So. Last night was one of those tough nights for me out at TentLife. I spent part of the weekend house sitting/horse sitting… and crashed back at the tent late Saturday night. Sunday came early and after church I got back to the tent with no plans, just a lot of nothing. I have been reading about silence and solitude in a few places and am really trying to push through my Extroverted ADD (which does not do well with the silence nor the solitude) – in trying to persevere in this repose I found myself frustrated and using my iPhone I tweeted this:

I guess in hindsight this is a Debby Downer tweet, and maybe subconsciously I was feeling the loneliness of TentLife… but the reason I posted this is because compared to living in a house, with A/C, Cable, Wireless Internet, et cetera… living simple is “overrated.” What I mean is – I came into it this adventure with such a romanticized idealism, and reality is difficult and at times “not much fun.” Silence and solitude “is a paradox… that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into the sensory world. With no newspaper to shield us, a train becomes a viewing gallery. With no novel to sink into (and no television to numb us out) an evening becomes a vast savannah in which furniture – and other assumptions – get rearranged.”¹

Also Eternal Wisdom from the Desert: Writings from the Desert Fathers, which is a book about Desert monks who believed that deep contemplative practice opens the door to eternal wisdom for daily life. I’ve realized that I have been looking at silence and solitude as the goal, but it is actually the vehicle to which I will attain the aim of simplicity, a lifestyle, a praxis of finding God in the world around me by listening intently to hear his voice and observing his creation to see his face.

This morning, I found that a couple of guys replied to my tweet last night… speaking encouragement to my quest – offering the perspective that pursuing silence and solitude is well worth the struggle:

And then this morning I looked outside the tent I saw this sunrise – in my mind it was God reminding me that the simple is not as overrated as I presume.

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1. Cameron, Julia; The Artist’s Way; 1992; pg 87