hermit's thatch

The poignancy of traditional hermit writing the world over is in the hermit’s contrast of society (cities, temples, palaces) with the freedom of the deserts, forests, and mountains. Deserts, forests, and mountains are not just symbols of the unchanging, but true habitats for a viable life of reclusion. But modern solitaries (and everyone else) have virtually lost this habitat, and with it even the symbols. The danger to the viability of life itself can be gradual or sudden: logging, mining, drilling, spoliation, pollution, dumping, poisoning, radiation. Human menaces have reduced deserts, mountains, and forests to environmentally endangered status. This has effectively reduced the possibilities for wilderness eremitism for moderns to a minimum. And government, corporations, and society would gladly eliminate privacy as well.

After many years of desert eremitism, the hermit Paul is recorded as asking a famous visitor: “How fares the world? What great cities have risen and fallen? What empire now holds sway?” Echoing these questions, we might today add: “And what desert, forest, or mountain is still viable habitat for a hermit?”

Wilderness survival books usually address emergency conditions of stranded hikers, skiers, hunters or accident victims. They focus on clothing, shelter, wood, food, the perfect knife, etc. All this can be practical but sometimes crude or full of bravado. Seldom are these books addressed to the conscious solitary. In browsing a handful of survival books, however, the fact that Alan Fry lives alone and once lived year-round in a tepee, in Canada, is notable, as is this passage from his Wilderness Survival Handbook, first published in 1958 when nobody else was making survival books a business or avocation:

When I go out from my camp on a very cold winter’s night [minus 50 degrees Celsius or -58 degrees Farenheit] to walk in the moonlight along the shore of a frozen lake … and I see the glint of moonlight caught by flakes of frost in endless sparkles over the perfect surface of snow that stretches nearly a mile away to the spruce forest bordering the distant shore, and when I look up and in the distance see a great mountain range gleaming in snowclad perfection by the light of this brilliant winter moon, when I have all this before me I all but burst with the joy of it.

In probably every culture much is made of the end of the calendar year and the beginning of a new one. But we must remember that this arbitrary assignment of days, months, and years are for convenience and have no natural necessity. Only the seasons represent more faithfully the passage of time. Herewith, part of a poem by the fourteenth-century Chinese hermit Ch’ing-hung:

The year is ending
the month is ending …
the moon lights the window the same as before
only the plum blossoms are different
but who cares
the Yangtze rolls on
the sun and moon do not slow their pace
a black dragon lurks in the clouds.

“Live in the moment” and “seize the day” are popular sayings that can easily be equated with hedonism and the left-hand tantric doctrines of India and Tibet. These sayings can create minds that do not live in but rather depend on the moment. Past and future are purposely folded into a planned, contrived “present” that obliterates consciousness for sensation, a kind of cheap mysticism of what exists in the material and is ephemeral. Being human, there will always be the temptation of delight, the burning of the candle at both ends, to quote the famous poem (Edna St. Vincent Millay). But the simplicity universal to all sages provides what is not contrived but is nevertheless real and cumulative. This suggests an attentiveness rooted in the real but not in the senses only. Perhaps the point is not to seek exuberance or ecstasy at all, so that living in the moment really is achievable in every moment not from any effort on our part but from letting everything else — everything contrived — go.

In a poem by the Chinese mountain hermit Ch’ing-hung, he recalls the day a gibbon came and took pears from his tree. The passage reminds translator Bill Porter of the story of the Taoist who took the magic peaches of immortality while visiting the Queen Mother of the West. In western lore, we may recall the golden apples of the Hesperides and, of course, the fruit of the Garden of Eden and St. Augustine’s purloined pears of youth. In the west a monster jealously guards the fruit; there is a message of despair, ignorance, and loss. Perhaps we are, with Ch’ing-hung, better to identify with the “no-mind” gibbon. I think of the “no-mind” bears, birds, and raccoons that “steal” the “fruit” — sunflower seeds — from my proffered garden and wonder at this magic.

I don’t know why they have not left but two cardinals remain, usually in the myrtle tree or bamboo, at dusk. I had removed the feeders under the roof eaves, in part because clever raccoons were climbing to the roof via a lean-to and either pulling the feeders up or knocking them to the ground. Then one day at dusk I heard birds fluttering in the myrtle and remembered the feeders. I retrieved and replenished one, hung it up, and moved away about five meters. One of the cardinals immediately flew straight for the feeder. Since then at dusk I notice the cardinal’s characteristic chirps; at dawn, too, it chirps, and I go out and hang up the feeder like a morning lantern. And though the feeder is hidden as soon as darkness falls, raccoons wax proud at having undone clipped hooks intended to foil them. Between birds and raccoons, no shortage of intelligence.
And bears. The mother and three cubs have reappeared several times lately. The cubs are tripled in size, leaving their mother looking positively scrawny. Still they travel together as a family.

Aristotle’s famous statement, “Man is a social animal,” has become emblematic of the notion of the necessity of social existence and the supremacy of politics and institutions over individuals. But what the statement itself and its proponents fail to realize is that the “social” is greater than human contrivances. Humans are part of the physical environment around them, part of the earth and seas, wind and rain, of the stars and galaxies. These, too, constitute the “social” context in which humans lead their lives. The other “social” part neglected by the proponents is the “social” relationship we have within our selves. Not so much that we are thinking beings, as Pascal said, but that we are sentient beings, and, moreover, conscious beings. From the consciousness within our minds to the farthest reaches of the universe, these are the “social” contexts in which we exist, not merely the circumscribed world of busy culture and the society in which we happen to be born, live, and die. If we are social animals, then our “society” is much greater than anything Aristotle or his followers ever imagined. The corollary, of course, is that our solitude cannot be viewed as the opposite of being social. It is social in this grand context.

What is the source of justice, or of any virtue? Is it the state, as Plato thought in his utopian period, or is it the rational faculty of human beings, as Socrates said? Is it collective historical experience that evolves a mindset of progress, or is it God conferring a divine right to whomever embraces a justifying interpretation of power? From collective experience came constitutions and declarations. From divine right and the “will of the people” come kings, potentates, and dictators. But in the end, all unnatural and contrived expressions, whether of power, divine inspiration, or seizing of opportune historical moments, are destined to pass. Humanity fails to embrace justice because it fails to comprehend that these aforementioned are not its source. Justice comes not from anything humans create. Justice comes from the universe and from nature. Justice constitutes the Way in myriad subtle expressions of nature. Evoking the empathy of human beings, justice becomes the harmony that the Way extends to existence. Society fails to perceive that “letting go” — not contriving — reveals justice. For individuals, solitude is the “letting go” of what is contrived to follow nature’s harmony, and to practice that justice that is already built into existence.

How often we speak of good days and bad days. On good days, people feel the sense of accomplishing something of value, of learning or enjoyment or encouragement. Bad days are not just days of misfortune or loss or frustration. Bad days may be reflective or meditative moments gone bad. We may sense the decades pass without having done anything or gotten anywhere. We may feel the lack of wisdom or serenity we thought should have arrived by now. We may suffer a shiver of fear or despair at the looming end. Even a passage in a friendly book suggesting the urgency of meditation may set off a sense of anxiety. We need so much to live in the moment, but are betrayed by time and undermined by the psychology — so deep-rooted in modern culture — of doing things here, now, and quickly. Can’t we just ask “why” of that demand? Can’t we just see the moments not as cumulative at all, but a spiral that takes us back and forth, or like the sea that ebbs and flows. There is nowhere we should be, only where we are here and now. And if we don’t want to be here, open a new dialogue with the self about it. There are no good or bad days, only days.

P.S. It’s been a year since hermit’s thatch began. The Web site is a little older, but took off in the search engines/directories about this time a year ago. Thanks to all who have visited, written, and — we’d like to think we helped — dreamed.

Is it easier today to be a solitary in an urban/suburban area than in a rural area or wilderness? Physical isolation, climate, and availability of food, supplies, and transportation have always been challenges for historical hermits. Today’s urban dweller can cope with climate; cost and not access to food, supplies, and transportation is the issue. Ironically, anonymity may be easier in urban/suburban areas than in small towns or rural areas. Perhaps the greatest challenge to the urban hermit is the most important one — losing touch with nature.