How often is repeated the notion that you can tell everything about a person according to how they act in a group. The modern jargon of team-building, focus groups, and interest communities depends on this psychological model, a replacement of the religious community or guild by the business model of productivity in a workplace. But the pressure to conform when in a group is great. Creativity has no productivity model. The most creative efforts of human beings are the products not of groups but of solitude. The builders of cathedrals were groups of laborers but the solitary who conceived of the cathedral worked alone. I am not thinking of Chartres but the cathedral of our purest being. It is the creative principle in the universe that we, in solitude, allow to emerge and work and create, through us. First there is labor — and dust, anguish, pain — but then, as the debris settles unattached to the cathedral, the cathedral rises to the sky, infinite, clean, unattributable to any hand or mind, not even our own.
journal of reflections by the resident of the Hermitary