"How did I find the stillness to calmly run out of my house while smoke poured in the windows and through the ceiling three months ago? Well, I'll tell you.
Through a connection, I heard about this wacky 'Art Monastery' thing a few years ago. I spent a week there in Italy. The week wasn't exactly filled with calm. We raucously made dinner, played boisterous games in the evenings, hunted for colored lights for a dance performance, filed seven or eight in the Kangoo car to get to the next event.
But then, I found it. The stillness. I found it watching the dance performance based on cloistered medieval nuns while in a 400-year-old church. I found it writing in my journal overlooking the Umbrian hills below. And I found it in the organic garden, while learning to bake bread, and during long talks with my Artmonk brothers and sisters.
I returned to San Francisco, and it kept going. I kept seeing these newfound friends, and our friendships kept growing. Many of my most heart-warmingly intimate moments over the past few years have been with these friends.
And then last January, I decided to go on the Art Monastery's silent meditation retreat.
The
Artmonk Retreat was, for me, a three-day reminder what I had in me whenever I needed it. I know the real world isn't like Briarcombe. I know I won't be surrounded by loving friends, fairy tale-esque natural beauty and the sounds only of the birds and neighboring horse once I leave. I haven't spent more than a few hours writing poetry since I left. But to know that it exists, I can (and plan to) go back whenever I'm able, and that we all have a chance to support the Art Monastery's model in whatever way we can gives me hope that those of us touched by the Art Monastery can take on all the other shit thrown at us the other 358 days a year.
So when my house caught fire six months after the retreat, I instinctively went to that place of stillness. The Art Monastery was one of the catalysts for that."