It was in 1991. I was in Lakewood, Ohio with a literally mangy rescue dog. Milton had passed mange on to me, and so we were both in recovery. I rented a delightful bachelorette apartment in The Baxterly building. I had a Murphy bed, east facing windows, and a clawfoot tub next to a steam radiator. I’d recently gone freelance as a sculptor, and had a disappointing end to a relationship with a good man. I’m not sure what exactly triggered the call, but it was a profoundly authentic urge that came from deep within, my response was somewhere between an ‘of course,’ a ‘yes,’ and a ‘whatthefuck?!,’ since I was and had always been an Atheist.
I called my father, who had made a habit of irritating my mother by saying he was going to build a monastery next door. I explained to him what I was doing. He seemed to understand and approve, and then, I said farewell. I had a friend come check on me once a month. I disconnected my phone. Unplugged the radio. I picked up some ancient music CDs at the Cleveland Public Library, and used copies of St. Benedict’s Rule and the Tao te Ching from the used book store.
To make ends meet, I’d drop off figurines and garden statuary at a few local boutiques once a month. That paid the rent. I tried to meditate twice daily, but wasn’t particularly good at it and my puppy caused frequent breaks in concentration. I put myself on a narrow but healthy dietary regimen, and ceased all socialization. I read my two books. I found parts more useful than others. I don’t recall any loneliness. I longed for some feeling of spirituality, and that was truly my quest. I thought a lot about that, and always came round to the same Atheism that I had always accepted.
Some of these idea were further shaped, forged, by a retreat that I made to an uninhabited island in Lake Michigan near the end if this monastic effort. I spent three weeks there one October. The temperatures flirted steadily with freezing while the wind howled, and the driving rain rarely ceased against the nylon tent. I was reading an apt book called The Origins of the Sacred, by Dudley Young. My dog, now grown and healed from mange, keeping close to my side.
I had (and have) no doubt that we are made of the same stuff as the rock, the chair, the exhaust pipe, the lake, and the flower. Something about this stuff has immense capacity that begins to coalesce into apparent cohesive consciousness when configured in types of networks, like a nervous system. There wasn’t room in this model for God, as some kind of distinct willful entity. But it is apparent, and was at the time, that sentience was an amazing property of this universal stuff, and freewill or the illusion there of carried with it immense responsibility as an an influencer of this stuff of the universe. The conclusion that I drew from all these mindful meanderings is that I am best characterized as an Atheist, and an Animist. I know as much as I can know that there is no cognizant grand maker of things. That does not reduce my experience of the world as a universe of common properties and amazing potentials. I act, therefore, as if it is all Sacred.
I was quite content with this conclusion and my life as a solitary, but found ends being difficult to meet. One month, my friend came by with news of a lucrative commission. I was financially in a corner and after some thought determined that I had to take it.
After making the decision, I ceremoniously turned on the radio. It was one of the final days of the Waco, Texas siege, of which I had no awareness of prior, The world seemed wholly different, and wholly at odds with my recent adventure. But there I was, trying to board an airplane with my toolbox on my way to build a sculpture. It took a long while to get my bearings again, but that call never left, not for a day, and despite many demands, I would often return to that space in my head, and keep my compass heading trued to that North.