I do, however, vividly recall waking up the following morning, stepping onto the ocean-facing porch, and being dumbstruck by holy awe and delight at the natural spectacle that unfolded before me. I couldn’t see more than a foot in front of the car’s bumper and I have little memory of how I found my way along 50 miles of Pacific Coast Highway, with its hairpin turns and guardrail-less cliff edges hundreds of feet above the Pacific, never mind the steep, unlit, two-mile lane of switchbacks that leads from the highway to the hermitage. I arrived at the hermitage late at night under a thick blanket of fog. I was on an extended solo journey - Instagram-christened as the #GriefRoadTrip - from Idaho, where Mom had been living for several years, back home to Southern California. I first visited New Camaldoli in late August 2019, a few weeks after my mother died. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish.” “Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Romuald, the 11th-century founder of the Camaldolese order, wrote in his brief rule. Such silence-keeping allows us to experience human community in a more deliberate and ultimately transformative way. In that choice there is a freedom to hear, see, and feel more of the natural world as well as our place in it. That silence descended like a pall when humans retreated, social distancing in the hopes of slowing the spread of a deadly virus. This quietude at New Camaldoli is different than the imposed silence that accompanied the global time-out wrought by the pandemic. It vibrates - a rich ecosystem of songbirds, raptors, owls, animals, cats (I encountered a stunning lynx, at a safe distance, on an early morning hike) and other creatures, thrums serenely with life, particularly at dawn and dusk, along the edges of the day. There is neither cell phone service nor internet access the nearest Wi-Fi is miles away, overpriced, and spotty. New Camaldoli is about as off the grid as you can get in North America. Vespers, the evening prayers, are followed by a 30-minute silent meditation inside the skylight-lit rotunda. Since its establishment in 1958, the monks of New Camaldoli have welcomed more than 150,000 guests of all faith traditions and none to stay in simple accommodations.Ī general silence is kept, except for the Liturgy of the Hours, when the community gathers in person (dutifully masked these days), to sing, chant, and pray the Psalms inside the hermitage chapel. Approximately two dozen Benedictine monks, members of the thousand-year-old Camaldolese order - the oldest continuous religious community in the Western church - live on 900 acres of wilderness in the Santa Lucia mountains overlooking some of the most breathtaking and unspoiled coastline on the planet.
In the winter, he loved apples, and sometimes he would have a small roasted quince.It’s a six-hour drive up the California coast from my home in Laguna Beach to the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur. Humphrey was not sure if it was carelessness or a deliberate ploy to test the honesty of others – primarily Humphrey. He was careless with money he kept a box filled with guineas, as many as a thousand, Humphrey thought, by the window. …” His curiosity did not rise to the level of dirtying his hands, however he hired a gardener to do the work.
Newton enjoyed taking a turn in his garden, about which he was “very Curious … not enduring to see a weed in it. Humphrey Newton sketched a few facets of Newton's life as he found it in the 1680s. As nearly as he could, he had reversed the policy of public communication that he began with his letter to Collins in 1670 and retreated to the quiet of his academic sanctuary. It took him another year to conclude the correspondence on optics, but by the middle of 1678, he succeeded.
Newton terminated his exchange with Collins by the blunt expedient of not writing. Oldenburg died in September 1677, not having heard from Newton for more than half a year. BY THE END OF 1676, as absorbed in theology and alchemy as he was distracted by correspondence and criticism on optics and mathematics, Newton had virtually cut himself off from the scientific community.