October 24, 2007 – Midnight. The coyotes are howling out in the woods. The donkeys and sheep are up in the pole barn, the barn cats have vanished into their secret hiding places. I think I’m going back out into the woods this week for some Thomas Merton-style meditating Wednesday. Also reading a lot of C.S. Lewis. Frank, a good friend from Connecticut, e-mailed me a wonderful Lewis rumination a year or two ago, and I am especially fond of it.

  “Are not all life long friends born at the moment when at last  you meet another human being who has some inkling of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?
 “You have never had it. All the things that have ever possessed  your soul have been hints of it – tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever became an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.”
  ” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our death beds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lost this, we lose all.”
  
  I have to say I wish I could write like that. I can’t, but I can love writing like that. And I know that I need to be around people who have some inkling of what I was born desiring, and desire still.
   Lewis captures what is, to me, the essence of spirituality – not necessarily one religious dogma or another, but the best of our innermost yearnings and strivings, desires and hopes that are rarely expressed, barely known, and often shoved aside by our unthinking rush through life. If we don’t seek them, we can’t find them. And most of us are too busy and harried.
   The secret signature of each soul is something I have to listen for, and sadly, it is perhaps necessary and true that we have to leave our homes and lives sometimes and go somewhere quiet in order to hear the rumblings and echoes of it, and to let it grow and breathe and live. Sometimes, I rush past my own life, caught up in e-mail, work, phones, chores, obligations and anxieties, an I cannot hear my own yearnings, recognize my own feelings. I can only react to external things, not allow my own interior life to come to consciousness.
  When this happens, I am lost.
  I have found, in my sixth decade of life, that I have to do this, craft my own pilgrimage, go on my own journey. I’ve found a place in the Vermont woods where I can do that, and so I have been going there, learning the strange and difficult rituals of camping – carrying in what I need, planning for what I can carry, anticipating what I must have and can live without. My back has to endure wooden boards for a bed, and much hauling of firewood on freezing nights. I forget critical things but am focusing on toilet paper, LED lights and matches, and long underwear.
  Still, that is the magic of camping. It is difficult and strange, and all the more meaningful for it. Another thing that suggests to people that I have lost my mind. Do I get lonely, they ask? No, never.
   For me, this is about finding my mind, as are many of the things that violate conventional wisdoms about life and orthodoxy, and what is right and normal.
   I am having an affair with the quiet. I have to go back, I told Paula. I understand, she says, as she always does.
  Still, I am thrilled when I get there and sad to leave. Challenging for me. I think for me, the secret yearning Lewis writes about is this peace and quiet, the temporary solitude and removal from life of the monastic. Merton wondered if solitude was about finding one’s interior life, or perhaps simply about escaping routine. I don’t know the answer to that. I think it’s about searching for an interior life, fighting perhaps for it, defending it against life.
    And, as always, a debate about which dog to bring. Izzy last time, but he is really not fond of the woods, prefers couches and heat, and so perhaps Lenore, the young Lab who loves damp and stinky things. And a slew of Merton and Lewis books and some new novels, or perhaps, just one or two books. And my camera, and my L.L. Bean camping chair to read in. Anthony joked that I was like Teddy Roosevelt, trekking into the woods with guides and haulers.
 I hope and pray that I will never stop seeking new things and learning how to do them and search for what I have been desiring year by year, from childhood to old age, and listening for? I want to be better, grow more, do good, honor my family and friends, write well.
  This is life itself, and while I am, this is. If I lose this, I lose it all.