“The world is too much with us…,” the poet said.
If, as Wordsworth says, we “lay waste our powers” by
“getting and spending” then one solution is to remove the temptation by
retreating from society.
The impulse to escape the travails of the world, to disconnect
the TV, avoid the news (if not “getting and spending”) is easy to understand.
It is one reason I came to Ghost Ranch. But for me it is temporary, an
interlude of rest and recuperation. Monastics make it a way of life.
By their nature and purpose monasteries are meant to be
retreats from the world. In many cases the idea of “retreat” is to remove
oneself physically from contact with the larger society. This can happen just
about anywhere—behind walls.
I drove a long way down a desert canyon to visit the
Monastery of Christ in the Desert. For those not faint of heart it is a popular
side excursion while staying at Ghost Ranch. This place has got seclusion
nailed (unless you count folks like me who are allowed to wander in from the
world!)
The dead end dirt road is 13 miles long. While thirteen
miles doesn’t sound far in our car culture, I averaged about 13 miles per hour
(not counting stops to take pictures.) That should make it easy to calculate
how long it took to get there!
I might have gone a little faster in a 4x4 pickup but my
little rental Kia Rio was not too steady on the narrow, dusty and washboarded
road. The little round pebbles didn’t improve traction any, either!
Much of the road also is only one lane wide, carved from the
red clay cliffs along the Chama River, with no barrier on the riverside edge.
There were occasional turnouts to allow opposing traffic to pass, but I
discovered that guys in SUVs seldom wait at a turnout. Yes, there was traffic
that had to pass. 12 miles of the road is forest service access to recreation
points along the river. Several times I had to squeeze by huge SUVs with kayaks
or rafts lashed on top. On one particularly harrowing occasion our rear view
mirrors nearly touched. And I was on the river side of the road!
Once I passed the last boat launch at mile 12, it was just
me and the monastery ahead.
There is some proverb, I think, about the silence of the
desert. (I’ve been blessed with the sounds of the desert; that old truism, if
it exists, must refer to the absence of human voices and the clamor of
culture.) If there is anything more silent than the desert it is a remote
canyon in the desert.
Furthermore, the monks at this monastery have taken vows of
silence. Even their own human voices are absent from their secluded existence. I
didn’t meet any of them. The person at the gift shop (there is a gift shop, of
course!) will talk to you (and sell you Christian paraphernalia; I resisted
spending and getting any of it.)
Seclusion is accompanied by self-sufficiency here. Solar
technology allows the monastery to retreat from the grid as well as society.
It was truly a peaceful place. The interior is dark and
enclosed, like a cave or a kiva. The silence felt like a presence rather than
an absence. Some, perhaps the reclusive monks, might name that presence. I was
content to feel it for a brief interlude.
When I stepped back outside it was the canyon itself that
moved me, now that my attention wasn’t on the perilous
drive to reach it. “Late and soon,” it is nature that I
name and claim.
Here is Wordsworth’s short poem in its entirety:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
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