For centuries there have been hermits among mankind. And we still have them — but they may look a bit different in the 21st century. Jack El-Hai in The Saturday Evening Post:
During the years he was a hermit, Roger Cunningham followed a rigid and self-imposed daily schedule. He began the morning by walking to the nearby general store for coffee. “I had promised my mother that I would have regular contact with someone each day,” he says. “She was concerned I’d be too isolated.” Then, back in his hermitage, a farm near Nicholville, New York, he began 45 minutes of Zen meditation at 7:00. After breakfast, he worked alone in some of the 50 separate gardens that constitute his farm. Then came a lunch break, followed by more gardening. He maintained silence throughout, with no use of the phone, radio, or TV, which ensured, he says, that “everything I did was in the same frame of mind.” After dinner, he allowed himself some phone calls and blogging in the evening. The day ended for Cunningham with a final 45-minute session of meditation before bed. One day a week he devoted to work on the nonprofit organization he directed that distributed produce from his gardens to food banks in the area.
Across the country, Sister Laurel O’Neal, who is a member of the Camaldolese Benedictine order, follows a different hermit’s routine. She lives in a one-bedroom apartment in California’s populous Bay Area. She attends morning mass, sometimes runs errands in the afternoons, gives spiritual direction to clients in personal meetings, blogs, and plays violin in an orchestra every week. But most of her time, as someone officially designated a hermit by her order, she spends in contemplation and prayer.
Like Cunningham and O’Neal, many modern hermits—people who make the silence of solitude, and the spiritual contemplation it allows, a central part of their existence—seem determined to shatter our preconceptions of how hermits live. Many reside in or near towns and cities, support themselves with some kind of work, and mix at least occasionally with other people. Most importantly, they bear no resemblance to the misanthropes, survivalists, and social outcasts and failures we sometimes associate with hermit life.
On the contrary, today’s hermits lay claim to old spiritual traditions.
There’s a lot more so go to the link to read it all.
I hate to say it, but that sort of describes yours truly. I do shows in my non-writing incarnation, and am now involved in a slew of writing projects. I have some people suggesting I move more to the writing because I do it with as much passion as I do the shows with enthusiasm. I’m online a LOT of the day to work on TMV and the other projects and answer emails. I need to interact more than doing shows and writing from my office (some have suggested I connect with a local company).
And I’ve met many over the years who don’t go out as much because they’re online, or watch cable, have food delivered. Even in television the era of “broadcasting” has given way to niche channels and “narrowcasting.” It’s turning inward with technology encouraging or enabling less human interaction. Will marriage proposals be sent by text a few years from now? Maybe they already are…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.