Searching for lost times.

I don't usually share my journals, but this seemed like a good post for Peregrinations, and I was too lazy to write it up any other way.  So:

I was up past my bedtime last night looking at YouTube Videos of places where I spent my life in the past.  Rivers.  Mountains.  Monasteries.  Many of the videos were made by  idiots, people who made no effort to learn about the places they were videoing, but at least the visuals were good.  Although one video of hiking along the Buffalo River Trail, was kinda pixely and green, I choose a screen catch from it of the waterfall that was for years my favourite rettreat and camping site for my journal, because it kinda shows how such memories work'.  

The best videos were of 'natural' places.  The Buffalo is still green.  The Chama is still brown.  The Edisto is still black.  But Christ in the Desert has been improved beyond   belief. The austerity of the desert has been replaced with garish 'icons'.  But they are not icons, they're bill boards.  I remember being shocked when Philip,  the abbot by the time I got there, and someone who had and has had a very different vision from Aerled's, started using a little Mattel keyboard to set the pitch for the chants.  Lore and I were both appalled.  Now there's an organ.  Everything is much more normal, and there are solar panels everywhere.  Sheep are back, which I find particularly nostalgic.  I can't believe I gave the poncho that Aerled wove for Lore to Cassidy for his baby.  Oh well.  YouTube says Signma males value their friends.

The challenge for me is to make sense of how much I have changed.   The changes pretty much parallel what has happened at Christ in the Desert.  I ordered a tent yesterday.  The temptation is to move back into a tent, with candles for light and maybe just my phone and a solar charger  But then there's my OV-Z.   Where do I draw the line?  Do I need to draw a line?  

The rivers lookedt the same in the twenty minutes or so of YouTube videos,  But iI know from even the short time I spent on them that they are always changing.  I was particular intrigued by one White River video of the upper river, between Boston and Fayetteville, where there has been very little effort of control it.  I hadn't ever seen anyone else on that stretch of the river, which is a meandering  and wild thing.  Lower down, beginning at Lake Sequoia in Fayetteville, we feeble folk have tried to control it at least since the time of steam boats.  Our efforts are often washed away.  Actually, they are always washed away, if we could only see them from a longer time scale.  The Bull Shoals dam, the levele at Augusta,  the lock and dam at Montgomery Point where the sacred White River joins the Mississippi, all these will be washed away. They have no choice.  Time, like an ever -rolling stream, bears all its sons away.

Those structures along the sacred White River may have a consciousness that I don't understand, and they may think they have some choice in how they spend their time. before they join the flood of lost times. I (cue Puck or Zorba) think I do.

Thirty or so years ago, when I spent time at Christ in the Desert Monastery, there was no electricity.  The guest rooms had wood stove and kerosene lamps.  On winter evenings in room 6 of the guest house, I would shiver as I wrote and drew in paper journals. Winter Matins in Nakashima's austere church had only one lamp in a corner.; one of the monks threw another log into the wood stove to mark the hours.  There were no solar-powered electric lights on the cliffs above to compete with rosy-fingered dawn, mirrored on the sandstone. There were no clumsy attempts at iconography on the walls.  It was Christ in the Desert, not Christ in the Glam.

Now I write about those times on a computer, and think about sharing my thoughts about those times on the internet, and I wonder two things:  whether I would really gain anything by trading  my computer for ink and paper in an effort to regain the sort of wildness of a river without levees and dams; and whether the real attraction I find thinking of those times past is that then I still thought I had a long future.  Were I forty-five again, and going to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, it might seem just as magic as it did in 1991.  And were I forty-five again, I might find the changes just as disturbing when I reached seventy-five again.  

I would love, I think, to be able to go back to the Monastery and talk to Father Christian, one of the monks who was there at the founding,  now the abbot, and ask how he feels about the changes, but I  probably won't.  I no longer have a car, and I'm too old  to hitch hike from Santa Fe to north of Abiqui and then to walk the 13 miles along Forest Road 151 to the bell, which I could pull to summon the guest master.

Oh well.   Please, pass me a madeleine.