{"id":2176,"date":"2011-06-23T20:16:25","date_gmt":"2011-06-24T01:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2176"},"modified":"2011-06-23T20:20:31","modified_gmt":"2011-06-24T01:20:31","slug":"hermits-visual-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2176","title":{"rendered":"Hermit’s Visual World"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Back in the early 1990’s, after breaking up from a short but intense romantic relationship, I went through a period of fascination with monks, hermits and the contemplative spiritual life. It was a good time and it lasted more than a few years. In many ways it is still part of me today, even though I didn’t have it within me to join a religious monastic order, or live a truly eremitic life<\/a>. But my life is still a good deal more quiet than most. <\/p>\n

During my years of “quiet discovery \/ discovery of the quiet” in the 90’s, I became a big fan of Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton<\/a>, who lived as a hermit for the last decade of his life. Well, sort of, anyway. Merton still had a lot of human contact, and one of his secular friends, John Howard Griffin<\/a>, got him interested in photography. I recently picked up a used copy of a wonderful photo book by Griffin published way back in 1970, just a few years after Merton’s untimely death on a trip to the Far East. It’s called “A Hidden Wholeness: The Visual World of Thomas Merton<\/strong>“, and it presents a fair number of artistic photos taken by Merton, and also photos of Merton by Griffin. Within the latter set are a series of shots, all black and white and quite wonderful, showcasing Merton’s living quarters (his concrete block ‘hermitage’ out in the woods of Kentucky). It gives a nice look at the day-to-day stuff like pots in the kitchen, the sink, his bedroom, a working desk, etc.<\/p>\n

Well, I’m not anywhere near the spiritual or artistic caliber of Merton and Griffin. But these photos nevertheless inspired me to get out the camera and get a few “quotidian” shots around my own apartment and hermitage-of-sorts. So, here is my kitchen stove on a Saturday AM, with some cooking projects underway. And the cabinet shelf where I store my hats, gloves and scarves, ready to fight off any cold and inclement weather. In black-and-white, no less. But yea, Merton probably got by with a lot fewer hats, gloves and scarves than I do, and not nearly as much other junk on the shelves. It’s tough being a simple hermit in the 21st Century!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in the early 1990’s, after breaking up from a short but intense romantic relationship, I went through a period of fascination with monks, hermits and the contemplative spiritual life. It was a good time and it lasted more than a few years. In many ways it is still part of me today, even though […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2176"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2178,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176\/revisions\/2178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}