This item on Kathryn Bloomquist from the Catholic News Agency and the Catholic Diocese of Salinas, Kansas describes how a widow became a nun and hermit within the Catholic rite. Sr. Kathryn had been strongly attracted to solitude throughout her marriage. When she became a widow, she sought out the bishop’s advice and then prepared for over four years to become a nun and simultaneously a hermit. Sr. Kathryn resides alone in the home she lived in with her late husband.
Pete Seeger: hermit honesty
American folk singer Pete Seeger, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday, tells a Voice of America News interviewer of a youthful desire built of rebellion:
As a teenager, Seeger says, he didn’t aspire to music, but to live in the woods. “I said I’m going to be a hermit. That’s the only way you can be honest in this world of hypocrisy. And I really meant it. I remember wondering, could I be a forest ranger? I went to a school where you learned to use an axe. And three days a week I was out there chopping trees.”
He returned to what his parents had surrounded him with in youth: music, musical instruments, and singing — and the rest is history. But Seeger still chops wood everyday and still lives in the log cabin he and his wife built in 1949 in Fishkill, New York.
URL: http://www.voanews.com/english/Entertainment/2009-05-12-voa14.cfm
Promoting silence
Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton is trying to designate Hoh Rain Forest (in the Olympic National Park in Washington State) the first National Quiet Place in the U.S.
Hempton is touring the country promoting his book, “One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World.” From an article in The Peninsula Daily News. His blog is One Square Inch.
How did Hempton come to such a calling?
A scare drove Hempton to take up his mission with fresh fervor five years ago. His hearing started to disappear for reasons his doctors couldn’t name. It was as if he were foreshadowing Beethoven, about to be robbed of his symphonies.
Hempton has his suspicions as to the triggers of his hearing loss. He worked on a loud train-recording project and has had infections — but never learned the cause of the problem that turned out to be temporary.
He regained 100 percent of his hearing after several months.
“I am thankful every day,” he said.
Brought to our attention by a friend of Hermitary.
Everglades hermits
The Butler and Bagman Chronicles is a blog by Mark Cowell about his personal interests. But he is also the son of Al Seely, an Everglades hermit mentioned in our 2004 article on the Florida Everglades hermits. In a set of entries with keyword “hermit”, Cowell notes that Al Seely was an alcoholic, and that his hermiting adventure was motivated by a diagnosis of fatal liver cirrhosis; he ventured to the Everglades to either survive or die — and he survived. A blog entry also mentions E. F. Atkinson, another hermit profiled in the 2004 article.
New Hampshire hermit
Perley: the True Story of a New Hampshire Hermit is a new book written by Shiela Swett Thompson, granddaughter of Perley Swett, a hermit of Cheshire County. The book is published by the county’s historical society.