Pendle Hill

This is the last day of my 5-day sojourn at Pendle Hill, a Quaker community outside Philadelphia. It's been just right. I have spent most of it writing in my closed room, a simple space in the brick "Main House." I go down for meals or the daily Meeting for Worship, or to raid the granola stash. I've had some good walks around the property, including several rounds through the bamboo labyrinth.

The people who live here are kind and welcoming, as you might imagine. They've chosen to be part of a very deliberate community, and everyone helps out with dishes, furniture repair, folding laundry. There are several students here -- most at least 40 years old -- who have come for spiritual guidance, Quaker study, and Pendle Hill's courses on art and spirituality. The students come from all over the world and stay for a couple of months or longer.

I'm comfortable here, in a Quaker setting. If my life circumstances were different, I could actually see myself living at Pendle Hill for an extended period of time. But if I lived here, I'd want to shake things up just a bit.

There's not a lot of humor, self-deprecating or otherwise, and I feel myself keeping my own sense of humor on a leash. A number of people sojourn here under spiritual duress: some have lost their way spiritually, some are just pretty serious folk. By definition, they're comfortable with silence, and sometimes that energy feels a little heavy. You don't hear a lot of guffawing.

Yesterday I made the smallest joke and my lunch table cracked up with surprise. Funny seems to be a surprise in a spiritual community, and that is something I'd want to be otherwise.

But I'm grateful to this community for taking me in for this sojourn. I am leaving a donation for the student from Benin who arrived a week ago and is as skinny as a broom. He has been cold ever since his plane touched down. I want to buy him some long underwear for the winter.

I'm also going to refresh the "Bacon Endowment" for the kitchen. Ten years ago a sojourner left a $75 contribution to buy a few bacon breakfasts for the community. They ate their way through that in short order, but became attached to having bacon now and then. Now it's a treat every couple of weeks. Everyone came for bacon breakfast a few days ago. We ate strips of a local, organically raised pig, which made us feel better about the indulgence. But I think we would have eaten bacon imported by fossil fuel from Argentina and carried the long way around the globe, it smelled so good.

Because other than that, the food is mostly vegan, and local produce. In December, the pickings are slimmer than other times of year, and the emphasis is on...let's say the durability of the cellulose. Last night was the weekly silent dinner, and we ate raw cabbage and onion, cooked kale, and a lentil salad. Since there was no conversation, the crunch, crunch, crunch throughout the dining hall was pretty funny. Thank goodness I wasn't allowed to say anything. I was so tempted to moo.