repairs

Meno: What do you mean by saying that we do not learn,
and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection?
Can you teach me how this is?
Socrates: I told you Meno, just now, that you were a rogue;
and now you ask whether I can teach you,
when I am saying that there is no teaching, but only recollection.

~ Plato, Meno.

Going by the numbers on what is commonly called the Western calendar, here comes a new year to be seized upon. I began journaling in 1994, albeit sporadically, and then consistently beginning in 1999. Even back then, I’d reserve an evening leading up to New Years Eve for a “year in review” journal entry. These are great to read back over, and I highly recommend this for those who write their perspectives. As 2000 approached, I wrote a “decade in review,” and have had occasion to do this twice since. Such practices are not meant to handwring and rehash, but I naturally took to preserving reflective summations of time spans, such as years, or weeks at work, or eras at schools and jobs, or lengthy travels. Having taught writing, I’ve created years of lesson plans built around journaling prompts, and encourage writers to make up their own so they can keep going. My favorite prompt materialized as I’d write in an Exchange Street café now long gone: I heard myself say... Coffeehouses, prior to the pandemic, were great places for lively conversations and for reflective writing. When I’d shift from some animated discourse to assembling written thoughts, something always lingered from what I’d heard and what I heard myself say. It’s a way to visit what is really in one’s thoughts. What have you heard yourself say? Living under covid-era restrictions (and now fewer cafés), configurations have changed, but eventually we can catch our spontaneous thoughts and still make note of them. Resolved to emerge from the last year’s housing misery which led to an inhospitable living situation, recently I heard myself say, “I think the only way to not crumple under all this is to see the dynamism in the open-endedness in front of me.” That’s how to start a new year.

I’ve always admired restorers of objects, structures, and historic artifacts. Gratefully, my speed-dial numbers include my typewriter repairer, fountain pen restorer, camera technician, and auto mechanic. These individuals are also esteemed friends. When any of us talk shop, we’ll often note the parallels between their crafts and mine as a bookbinder and conservator. The purposes of our respective restorative work is to keep things in fine operational order. Often when I stitch a set of signatures and add silk bands at the extremities of a spine, I’ll invoke how the owner of Cambridge Typewriter says, “it doesn’t just have to work well, it has to look good!” Tom says this while polishing the parts and cover of a Royal or an Olympia- just as Greg across town used a special chamois to make my sterling silver Bossert & Erhard fountain pen gleam as crisply as it writes. When I use decorated endpaper material to conserve a book, I’ll usually make matching bookmarks and dustjackets out of the excess. Among my workplace colleagues, the maintenance workers take as much interest in what I’m doing as the librarians. Now 24 years in professional practice, I’ve always considered preservation to be the archivist’s operatio Dei. Conscious of that, I’m sure to use the best alkaline, long-fibred materials I can find, so the books and documents will have lengthened lives of utility and integrity. Too many aspects in societies, workplaces, municipalities, and throughout the world are woefully broken. While wishing all along to practice a tangible compassion, some things I can do are to continue preserving the documental record and the written word, and try to be an encouraging ingredient to all those with whom I interact.

As startling as it is to ponder, the covid pandemic era is now at its 3-year mark. If the present time is a latter stage, its duration remains unknown. Social and mental health impacts have yet to be fully evaluated. An immediate shock for many were the sudden disruptions, quarantining requirements, and isolation during the scrambling for immunization. Surely a topic for a later essay. Sufficient for the moment, as a social being and public employee, I had to fall back upon skills cultivated during my years of solitary work. While we were all learning about “supply chains” and shortages not seen in more than a half-century, many turned their efforts toward “do it yourself” work-arounds to such practical matters as producing household cleansers, clothesmaking, and doing more cooking from scratch. A great many of us that had never “worked from home” found ourselves, by necessity, pressing our apartments and computers into service to be able to stay employed. I created a remote version of my service desk by using a corner of my dining table, also purchasing headphones and a refurbished laptop- even repairing books in my kitchen.

As a longtime bookbinder, as well as a bicycle repairer, I could simply use my various sets of tools to remedy basic mechanical and electrical problems. During the 14 months of rotating my work site, between the library and my apartment, I took to carrying tools from one location to the other. In order to stay organized, I separated the materials and flash-drives by their function, helping to always have on hand what was needed. With just about all my commerce done online, along with most everyone, I had to deal with purchases arriving after long spans of time- and damaged. For example, a small toolbox for archival marking tools, hard enough to find, broke in transit. The vendor did not have any others, and kindly reimbursed me. Really wanting to use the box, and taking a good look at it, I replaced the completely broken hinges by melting small holes in the plastic with a bookbinding awl which I heated in a candle flame, and using 2 pairs of needlenose pliers to create rings out of bent-out thick paperclips. My repair worked like a charm, and has been holding up now for 2 ½ years and counting. Like my stitched bindings, the repaired item has more strength than the original structure. I use the box daily, it’s become one of my reminders of these times.

Essential to the repair of an item is understanding how it works. Having to do much more of my living and working as a reluctant shut-in, it invariably became necessary to organize my household. (This proved helpful when the building very sadly had to be emptied of its residents last summer and all of us had to move out.) My usual studies and writing had to be done in and close to home (but at least I had a spacious place to live, at the time). Very thankfully, a supply line was opened to me via the Boston Athenaeum’s mailing and database services. I also continued teaching via Zoom, joining the many who became fluent in the medium.

Amidst these times, I reacquainted with old writing tools, and put them into working order. Pens present their own forms of mechanical puzzles. While rinsing a much-loved Reynolds fountain pen from one of my many sojourns in France, I watched the ring from the nib section roll across the kitchen sink and irretrievably down the drain. As with the toolbox mentioned earlier, a study of the pen showed me how the ring was more than decorative trim- it actually provided the needed margin of space to allow the pen to be tightly capped by pushing the nib section into the mechanism that snaps it closed. I set the disabled pen on my desk, not sure what to do with it. One night, while writing and listening to the radio (a supply-line of culture itself), I stopped to look at the poor old Reynolds and an empty yoghurt cup I used for calligraphy. That curved rim got me thinking, and it occurred to me that perhaps if I could slice the plastic just right, I’d have a replacement part. Using my narrowest bookbinding mat knife, and masking tape to hold the container in place, I sliced thin strips of the plastic. It took a few tries, as I saw how exact the fit had to be, to get the pen to snap closed with the same click as it did before with its former metal ring. After getting the precise breadth and length, I sliced an extremely thin slice of archival plastic tape for the inside of the replacement ring. It worked perfectly, and I was able to use the pen as before- albeit sporting a white yoghurt container ring.

I later found other uses for the strong, yet thin, plastic material to create spacers for altering new refills to fit older pens. Either due to cost savings, or forced obsolescence, inserts for even the higher-end ballpoints are manufacturered shorter now than before. Unlike a fountain pen, a ballpoint is essentially a “handle” that houses an inserted refill combined with its writing-point. The two components, like a textblock and book-cover, need to perfectly fit to be functional- and look right. Using very tiny pieces of the yoghurt cup plastic, I created spacers to customize and “push out” the points as needed for both the writing and the retracting. Getting the right fit was followed by adhering my homemade parts to the backs of the refills, and using a heated sewing pin to create a “breather” for the ink. Again, the repairs have held up to use, and the tools have been in the fine operational order of my preference!

Having field experts as friends makes for great conversations. As well, I can turn to their professional expertise, supporting their enterprises, too. As it became possible to visit with neighbor and longtime friend Pat Daunis at her shop, I brought her my Reynolds pen, and asked about creating a permanent part to replace what I had made. She liked what I’d created, and used it as a reference point. We had a great visit, talking about the crafts of lettering and calligraphy- and I hired her shop to fashion a new pen ring. Daunis jewelry is among the very best and most highly-regarded that is made in Maine. Pat made the new and precise pen ring out of brass. This will surely last for the life of the pen- and I’ll make certain to rinse it over a tray, with the sink drain-stopper in place!

Last week, I visited with another old friend whom I respect very much, and that’s Andy the owner of Classic Camera & Repair of Maine. I’m continuing to work full-time through these extremely difficult times. The slivers of personal time I’m able to find are for reflective writing and photography. I made sure to keep my faithful Rolleiflex unpacked, and have been making new images during snowstorms again. Andy helped me by testing the camera’s shutter, and that occasioned a heartening visit.

Repairs and restoration are expressions of healing. I think of this when I bring books back to life, as well as when I see how fellow craftspeople and mechanics perform their own renditions of this. Of course, the treasures made for written and photo arts are meant to be used en route to new creative ventures. The damage done by the displacement last year, like collateral social ramifications of this pandemic, have yet to be assessed or remedied. I won’t know the extent of this current nightmare, until landing in a peaceful and comfortable living space- away from stomping, blaring, odors, and congested confinement.

Finally and for the moment, I recently stepped away from the fray for the first occasion in a year, with a week in Boston. Soul repair takes much more time than it does to calibrate an instrument or to fabricate components. And iron-willed patience. Between the always-welcoming environment at Beacon Hill Friends House, and inspirational studies at the Boston Athenaeum, I especially savoured the sweet familiarity of beloved communities. Not only could I hear myself thinking, but I sensed myself breathing, being in the presence of many kindred spirits, and in the absence of overhead bombast. Indeed, the idea is to bask amidst the moment, though admittedly it became a distraction to want to load up on peaceful civility for the road ahead. To say the least, I took many notes, aperch in some beautiful places.

savour

“Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world,
answering that of God in every one;
whereby in them ye may be a blessing,
and make the witness of God in them to bless you;
then to the Lord God you shall be a sweet savour,
and a blessing.”

~ George Fox, letter from Launceston Gaol, 1656.

In my previous essay, I wrote about the assuring properties of a “split-second.” By this, I refer to spontaneous, uncontrived personal resuscitative moments that have reassuring properties. A distant memory returned to me from childhood, of a hockey coach’s quirky two-syllable caring gestures. Then I found that in the face of daily life increasingly hinging on the tentative, on all fronts, I’d occasionally whisper to myself, “just for now.” A reinforcing breath, held to memory, serves as a hurricane’s eye at the center of turmoil. I’ve even taken to reminding myself not to embellish any impressions of duress as endless and inescapable. Sufficient unto the day are the ends of my shoes.

As a recollective moment serves as a rock perch in swirling river rapids, a retreat is an island amidst swarms of indistinguishable months of hard labor. Earning the time and making the plans, I carved out a seven-day sojourn on Beacon Hill. As is customary, the week prior to my time off was replete with the usual barrage of ineptitude and overtime- but I got through my obligations. Cathartically reclining in my train seat, stretching out and enjoying a rolling view of the Saco River, I made note of the railroad journey as a resuscitative moment. While looking forward to my destination, I found the way there pronouncedly reassuring. I heard myself say, savour this. This thought remained with me, across the snowy salt marshes, through the backlots of Dover and Haverhill, and across the Charles River.

Alighting onto Causeway Street and seeing no frozen precipitation descending, I decided to trundle across the West End and up Beacon Hill. I’m no stranger to this traversal. Brisk paces inclining up to Cambridge Street, followed by measured half-strides up the sharply graded Hill- and this with a backpack and 3 heavy bags, one filled with baked goods I’d made for my kind hosts. “I’ll go home lighter,” I always rationalize to myself. As expected, the huffing and puffing began halfway up Hancock Street. But I said to myself, savour this. And it’s up, and up, and up, pulling all that cargo, amusingly turning at Joy Street. “Are you savouring this?”- I asked myself, still ascending, in a purgative froth. “Sure, why not?”- following my own words and looking up at the pale housepaint sky. In my grateful relief at being away from employment tribulations, everything around me looked comforting. Straining and sweating on a winter day, pulling belongings, gifts, and my typewriter up the steepest neighborhood in Boston, I exhaled “savouring this, savouring this,” with my strides.

Indeed, I wanted to be there, through every part of the journey. Inevitably my upward passage crested at Mount Vernon Street, bending left at Walnut Street, finally experiencing the benefits of favorable gravity, looking right to Beacon Hill Friends House nestled along Chestnut Street. In a neighborhood of posted gaslights, the Friends House has a large lamp on an outward arm, as though extended to greet passers-by. It’s a votive of confidence, held out for pilgrims seeking refuge. Finally, I hoisted all trailing freight up the curving stone steps to the front door at Number Eight. The basis of a retreat is essentially a savouring of what is. The idea is to break the routine, borrow some time, and rekindle alertness to savour what is good. The residence manager and I recognized each other with joyful greetings. He spoke the most perfect words I could have imagined hearing: Welcome Home. I immediately savoured this, proceeding to settle in- not a single one of my dozens upon dozens of well-packed home-baked cookies broken- greeting more residents en route to my usual room.

From the very start of my seven-day sojourn, I savoured a profound awareness of being welcome, and this set the tone throughout. There was a snowstorm immediately after my arrival, prompting me to savour my timing. I found myself waiting outside the Church of the Advent during the heaviest snowfall; the rector was late for the morning office. But the ensuing welcome made the wait worthwhile. I didn’t even mind my drafty room, named after the pioneer Quaker George Fox, at the Friends House; it’s always drafty in there. Why not savour the reminder that this was my 12th sojourn with the community? At the heart of each of these retreats are my studies at the Boston Athenaeum, through which I find words and ideas to savour. I always plan a personal study theme for these extended stays, selecting material from the library’s archival collections. This time, it was what I called Assurance and Divine Guidance. Each of my readings had these ideas in common. An example is from Nathaniel Appleton’s Discourse, published in 1742, in Boston:

“Faith is a Grace that inspires a divine life into the Soul; and the good Man may make a comfortable Subsistence on it, even in the worst of Times. Habakkuk: 2.4. 'The just shall live by his Faith.' ‘Tis by this that he fetches constant Supplies from Heaven... By this he looks up to the Recompence of Reward, reserved in Heaven for him, and is animated and quickened in a Life of Piety, by the glad Assurances of it. And by this he maintains a Life of Communion with his dear Redeemer: and let temporal Things go how they will with him, while he can do this he is easy, he is happy, he is joyful. Thus beholding as in a Glass the Glory of the Lord, he is changed into the same Image, from Glory to Glory. Thus for this Life he has a glorious Provision made for him.”

Alongside lifegiving words I heard and studied, were savoury sights, sounds, and tastes. With the occasion of residency on Beacon Hill, I have round-the-clock possibilities for unfettered walks along mazes of intricate streets, as well as through parks and bustling thoroughfares. Urban creature that I’ve always been, a good, large city is as relaxing as it is inspiring. Merchants use their wares as decorative elements. The supply of photo motifs is endless, and the juxtaposition of sidewalk musicians woven among pedestrians provides contrasts with the quiet residential lanes. Yet another contrast is the interior of a cavernous sanctuary, deep in the city, an island of contemplative quiet with soothing and occasional echoes.

Church of the Advent, Boston.

Perhaps the most obvious connotation for savoury is taste. It is a joy to bring baked treats to my hosts at the House, the Athenaeum, the Advent, and to shopkeepers I know as friends. The motivation is not that of any kind of “exchange,” but simply one of gratitude. For me, it is a gift in itself to see others happy. On these retreats, I am surely recipient of savoury abundance- from House dinners, to high tea at the Athenaeum, to convivial evenings out. One fine midday, I accompanied members of the Athenaeum staff to a memorably lavish lunch at the Somerset Club. On this recent sojourn, amidst the week of aromas and cheers of the Friends House dining room, I was treated to a dinner on the house by a colleague who is also a restaurant manager. The latter, a small bistro on a side street, provides an environment as savoury as the meal. My friend sat me near the latticed front windows, which I found to be ideal for writing. From a perch within a perch, my appreciation extended from the seasonings and substance, to the textures and sounds of the busy- yet calmly intimate space, by the subdued warmth of incandescent light. Even the return walk to the House, through icy air, was something to savour.

Returning to words as enduring reminders, in that usual serendipitous way, mixtures of readings I select in advance turn out to perfectly intertwine. Somehow this always happens, even as my selections span centuries and varieties of authors. Perhaps it’s a result of ingenious library cataloguing. Perhaps it also has to do with a reader being an active factor in joining works of literature together in the moment. Among anticipated connecting themes, I repeatedly noticed my savour observation in much of what I studied. Across eight literary works, by as many different writers, a noticeable amount of glimmers emerged about savouring one’s living faith. Don’t take your heartfelt belief for granted. Appleton observed, “we are the possessors of so inestimable a treasure.” Writing about spiritual confidence, Samuel Worcester (19th C) wrote that our faith is the most precious of treasures. In an anonymous work called Path to Happiness (18th C), the writer describes how, “those principles which are really received into our hearts, have an inseparable effect on the actions and conduct of our lives,” and that we must maintain the “safety of that invaluable treasure within us, our immortal souls.” Richard Lucas (17th C), encouraging his readers to persevere, used the exhortation that we “make our progress into assurance.”

Indeed, the reader does play an active role in thematically joining works of literature together. Study is as much analysis as synthesis. The seekers are those who find. And a string of days filled with intense study produces a momentum of perception and awareness. During my leisurely morning coffees, between the Advent and the Athenaeum, words that celebrate the savoury appeared in no less than the sports pages. My muses, once again, were hockey players; this time in gratitude for the Bruins’ unexpected successes. Their specialty is a game that is made of split seconds. “How lucky we are to be here,” offered Brad Marchand to the Boston Herald, “You want it to last forever, but that’s not how it is.” They look as far as the next game. “I appreciate every moment,” philosophized team captain Zdeno Chara, “It goes by fast. It’s very humbling and I’m very grateful I’ve been able to play for this long in the game I love and enjoy so much.” Of course the ideas in my studies and thoughts stayed with me, as I read the morning recaps! Philosophy and competitive sports are not so far from each other. Savour the good words. Store them where you can find them, in the soul’s archives.

Bruins and Brew, at Café Tatte, Boston.

Just as scholarly learning is an ongoing process, so is the ability to savour. The authors and athletes alike knew to treasure their confidence and their participatory moments. Thomas Merton was one to say that spiritual life is as much struggle as it is contemplation. As vigilance is active, savouring is passive. During my studies in the rare books room, I looked up through the tall windows facing Beacon Street, and wrote in the margin of my notes, “we can never know the stability of our times, places, and loved ones.” Intermissions from the struggle provide time to better appreciate what is meaningful. I do as I am able to afford. By very intentionally savouring a situation or an experience, there’s an ingredient of trying to make time stand still- trying to permanently preserve the moment. But like the hockey player said, that’s not how it is. I know this empirically, as I hold moments in writing and photography, while ferociously pointing toward hopes for better days.

At my little windowside table in the bistro, delicately tasting my dessert, I wrote in my journal: “Savour dares me to sense some contentment, even through so much difficulty and instability. 'Savour this' means to really taste all this wonderful food and ale, this place, and commit all of it to memory.” An improved perception must transcend the retreat, and be with me in the work trenches. In ways that are similar to how I connect the words I read, it is vital to be able to find what is worthy to savour. These weeks on Beacon Hill always conclude with the Sunday’s Quaker Meeting for Worship. Indeed, I savoured the company of friends, as well as the wise contemplative silence of the gathering. Settling into the communal silence, I certainly had to ride out distracting thoughts about the frustrations and insufficiencies awaiting me. Then I chased them out of the present, recalling what I had been studying about holding inestimable treasure in an earthen vessel. Glancing around the large room, filled with kindred spirits, I noticed sunlight coming in from the Chestnut Street side. It was as though the authors I sought out were passing messages to me, to trust that my faith is something real- to savour this very simple thought, and to continue to stay able to savour.

school of silence

“There is another school
where the soul must go
to learn its best eternal lessons.
It is the school of silence.
‘Be still and know,’
said the psalmist,
and there is profound philosophy there,
of universal application.”

~ A.W. Tozer, The Set of the Sail.

The simplest sojourns lend themselves to becoming intricate adventures, when moving with the moment. Amidst gift occasions of unstructured time, deepest learning can take root. My responses to the sudden possession of earned and rare leisure reverts me to reverent wonders of times past. Especially at school, though it has easily transferred to employment life. It is a childlike joy, even to old souls, to freely look up to unimpaired skies and mid-day colors outside the usual walls and fences. Undemanding unstructure is so unusual to many of us that the very context generates an inherent exhilaration.

Open air and open-ended days are rare treasures for those who toil in the trenches from which remuneration must be drawn. The light and air of a late morning is for the exultation of the unconfined, and perhaps lives of constant work are best able to find and savor contrasts. Gazing up from labyrinthine constriction, horizons cannot intimidate. Promise, potential, and newness of life manifest mysteriously in the form of a clear slate. I’m reminded of this each and every time I’ve made an arrival at a place of retreat. Reaching a desired destination generates an incidental excitement, along with gratitude for the careful purpose of repose. During last week, I experienced a retreat that was warmly familiar yet ever new, an immersion into substantial silence at the center of a large city. Through seasonal frozen New England air, I arranged an intermission from my work and travelled to a week’s sojourn in Boston. My destinations and the winter ambience provided wise silences from which I found learning and consolation.

Beacon Hill Friends House
Above: Beginning of snowstorm;
Below: During snowstorm.

The waystations of my week of retreat, cozy as home, included my esteemed Boston Athenaeum for days of reading in their rare books room, lodging amidst the lively community life of the Beacon Hill Friends House- with its sacred spaces, mornings with the Divine Hours at the Church of the Advent, and all points in between on Beacon Hill. An unanticipated element came late in the week, with the arrival of a 28" snow blizzard. The elements did fit serendipitously well together, amounting to a composite of comparable settings of nourishing and needed quiet. Travelling by train during post-commuter hours, on the journey from Maine combined late-morning hush with astonishing sunlight- surely outside the realm of countless workdays.

Alighting at North Station, my first stop was to settle in at the Friends House and deliver desserts I baked in gratitude for the always welcoming “Housies.” From there, I walked to the Athenaeum to deliver more desserts for the library staff. If I have any influence in this vast world, one thing I can surely do is to express my thankfulness. Having planned the travel well in advance, a shelf of ancient tomes awaited my arrival in the Special Collections reading room. With each of these reading retreats, anticipatory reviews of the Athenaeum’s catalogue allow me to create themes with diverse reading materials. During one retreat I read journals written by Quaker adventurers of the 1600s, and on another week’s sojourn I sought the fascinating literary colors of Richard Baxter. This time, I sought personal inspiration, choosing 16th and 17th century reading that emphasized perseverance, faith, and conscience.

Boston Athenaeum, during snowstorm.

Within the Athenaeum library, a sanctuary in itself, the rare books room is an inner sanctum available only during weekdays. In between acclimating to reading Elizabethan English on four hundred year old paper, I reminded myself to look around the high-ceilinged room. Beneath large oil paintings and skyward windows, a polished wooden table supported study lamps and cradled the folios open before me. Facing up to me from the great many pages I read were insights and exhortations from across the ages. John Preston’s words from the early 1600s reached my 21st century eyes, and I pencilled them verbatim into my notes:

“We have but a short time to live in this world, the strength of our mind is the most precious thing we have, the thoughts and affections that we have, the business, the activeness of our minds; we should be careful to improve them, we should be careful that none of this water run beside the mill. That is, that it be not bestowed upon things that are unworthy of it.”

Above: My reading notes from the rare books room.
Below: Writing in the Friends House library, lit by snow.

Only pencil and loose paper leaves are permitted in the rare books room. I even had to leave my binder outside the room, though now it has 22 new pages of notes and quotations from a week’s worth of reading 5 different books by as many different authors. My daytime hours were arranged around these studies, and as news of the impending blizzard solidified, I changed my reading sequence, and the Athenaeum reference staff very kindly adjusted their coverage of the rare books room to for me to maximize my time. By the time I could see snow billowing outside the large reading room windows, causing the library to cancel operations for the day- and the following days- I had completed my reading. The weather really did not disappoint any plans, but actually provided contemplative time after my intense studies. There was just enough time to visit a dear old friend, whose chaplaincy at Northeastern University includes The Sacred Space which provides healthful solitude and refuge for his community. The balance of my week’s time, under heavy snow, was open to visiting, writing, and walking.

Church of the Advent, at left.

Two days of unrelenting snowfall silenced the large city, as well as the entirety of New England. I had the unusual benefit of being at the center of an arm’s-reach downtown neighborhood which did not experience outages, and at leisure. My daily attendance at the Church of the Advent’s morning vigil continued, thanks to the rector lending me his snow galoshes. The Friends House community itself was in a pleasant snowbound mode, making the best of things with potluck meals and rotating shoveling duties. Their large kitchen is very much a livingroom. Continuing as a pilgrim retreatant, I was able to enjoy the House’s own library, take photographing walks through snowfilled streets, and write during mid-day hours. Reviewing my Athenaeum notes, I noticed how often Preston would return to the Genesis 17 reference to “God is all-sufficient,” as though a sung refrain in his work, “The Saint’s Daily Exercise.” Francis Atterbury, also among my readings, emphasized “acquaint thy self with God,” over and again in “An Acquaintance with God the Best Support Under Afflictions.” My places of quiet contemplation varied, though qualitatively they were entirely consistent.

In his journal, which I studied at the Athenaeum, Daniel Stanton (an 18th century Quaker) described his travels through Colonial era New England. Indeed, I had to look up and enjoy my window views when I read his words from 250 years ago: “I was somewhat detained by a storm of snow; when it moderated, I got forward.” On a following page he wrote, “I enjoyed great comfort of mind, and near unity with Friends... it bespoke a day of visitation of God’s love, and I wish it may be ‘as bread cast upon the waters, that it may be found after many days.’” Throughout the week, and along the hushed northbound train home, the idea of deep learning through contemplative silence continued emerging in my thoughts. The savoring of silence is itself a schooling. It requires shutting away distractions and departing from noise we otherwise adaptively absorb. Yet the goodness in being immersed in goodness has lasting effects. The reminders have followed my steps and will lead my subsequent steps toward future sojourns.

At Beacon Hill Friends House.

friendly confines

“Wisdom dwells in Nothing, and yet possesses All things,
and the humble resigned Soul is its play-fellow :
this is the Divine alloquy,
the Inspiration of the Almighty, the Breath of God, the holy Unction,
which sanctifies the Soul to be the Temple of the Holy Spirit,
which instructs it aright in all things:
and searches the depths of God”

~ Jakob Böhme, from The Signature of All Things (1651)

Above: the Library; Below: the House.








Beacon Hill Friends House interiors










Above: Morning vigil at the Church of the Advent;
Below: Coffee at Café Vanille, Charles Street.



















The sweetness of conviviality at Beacon Hill Friends House.