About 50 years ago, in a well-to-do community near Detroit a child refused to be hugged. She didn’t speak, preferred the companionship of dogs, the confines of a hole she had dug in the back yard, and wisdom offered by the Jack-in-the-Pulpit that emerged once a year in the tangle behind the garage.
In Kindergarten, she was set aside because she barked, rather than spoke.
She soon developed aptitudes in the arts and science, but worked alone, or as a ringleader, hoping to inspire other kids to bark, learn about black holes, or ride her unicycle with her.
Throughout young adulthood, she felt like an outcast, and was generally treated as such. At Catechism, she professed that she couldn’t make the leap of faith that came so readily to the others, and the Pastor shrugged it off, but thanked her for her honesty. It was a great surprise to her when at the age of 23, she heard her first call to monasticism.
This first call resulted in 18 months of monastic life, modeled after St. Benedict’s rule, searching for a greater sense of spirituality. It wasn’t found. The young lady was a sceptic at heart, and she came to the conclusion that either nothing was sacred, or everything was, but there was a sameness to the fabric of the Universe, there was no sacred AND profane. It was all one, or the other. Without the ability to discern which was the case, the best way to live, she determined, was to live as if everything was sacred.
During this bout of monastic experience, twice, she spent three weeks alone on an uninhabited island in Lake Michigan with her dogs, and was pained to return when food stores ran low and weather permitted crossing.
She left her hermitage when an unexpected and fiscally needed sculpture commission pulled her into society again.
She participated in society for some time, living in warehouses and working as a professional sculptor, but the call to the woods, to nature, to that which was best assumed sacred, was irrepressibly loud. After giving up her studio and initiating a solitary life in a Northwoods cabin, she found out that she was pregnant. Her solitude this time was short lived, as supporting and raising her son took precedence over her own inclinations. While raising her son, she found a stipend to earn her Masters and Doctorate, continuing a quiet life of study, but primarily as a parent, rather than a solitary.
20 years later, that son was effectively raised (and he’s wonderful), she took to living in a 10’x12′ off grid shed in the woods to save money to build her hermitage, to be called Mons Domus. The business that she started half a decade before selling wildflower seeds and educating about pollinators was now almost fully run by employees, and she designed and built her monastery with the time and fiscal security the business afforded.
After 3 years, Mons Domus was complete. She had modest revenue to pursue solitude, and care for a small menagerie of rescue animals. She began blogging her narrative of her new life of committed solitude, its rewards, and challenges in order to save some the trouble, and, perhaps, inspire others.