Blue Highways: Monastery of the Holy Spirit, Georgia

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapIn this post, I get reflective, very reflective.  It's William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) fault because he stops at a Trappist monastery to learn why monks remove themselves from the world.  That leads me to reflect on my own inability to do so when I need to, and to examine the journey of a friend who seems to be able, through running, to find the best of both worlds.  I hope you find your healthy solace and solitude through reading this post.  Click on the map at right to see where LHM did his own little retreat, and feel free to let me know how you occasionally step away from the world.

Book Quote(s)

William Least Heat-Moon:  "Why would a sane man sequester himself?  Renounce the world?  How could he serve a religion that makes so much of love among peoples and then keep to himself?"

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 17

Brother Patrick, Trappist:  "I begin with this broken truth that I am.  I start from the entire broken man - entire but not whole.  Then I work to become empty.  And whole.  In looking for ways to God, I find parts of myself coming together.  In that union, I find a regeneration....

"....Coming here is following a call to be quiet.  When I go quiet I stop hearing myself and start hearing the world outside me.  Then I hear something very great."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 18

Inside church at Monastery of the Holy Spirit near Conyers, Georgia. Click on photo to go to its host site.

Monastery of the Holy Spirit, Georgia

As I get older, I am a man who is beginning to understand himself.  Two years ago, after I finished my dissertation, I began to emerge from the self-imposed home exile into which I had put myself.  When one writes a dissertation, one immerses him or herself into the writing.  Days are spent trying to get something, anything on the paper.  The time for socializing is limited.  I had moved to a new city, Albuquerque, in 2004 and unlike in other cities where I lived, I didn't really go out seeking friendship and companionship.  I had work to finish.  It took four years.  While my wife was working and meeting people, I spent most of my days at home in front of the computer.

I was growing unsatisfied with life.  It seemed that my wife was ramping up her life with her career, her professional activities, and her friendships, and I wasn't ready to go along.  I was not willing to, as I saw it, careen from one event to the next.  I wanted something more sedate and controllable.  But conversely, I was also lonely.  I hadn't developed many friends in Albuquerque.  I was alone a lot, and I didn't like the aloneness.  In fact, I feared it and always had.  Wounding, hurtful views that I had about myself, created in the cauldron of family dysfunction of my youth, always came flooding to the surface when I was alone.  My doubts and fears, my self loathing and hatred, they always were lurking under the surface of my active life.  To be alone was to face them, and I didn't want to face them.

When I finished my dissertation, I ended up taking a one-year position as a visiting professor in Lubbock, Texas.  My wife stayed in Albuquerque.  I spent my weekdays in Lubbock, and drove five hours to Albuquerque on Friday and five hours back to Lubbock on Sunday.  In Lubbock, I was both alone and lonely.  I was lonely for my wife, lonely for friends.  And I was alone.  I feared greatly being alone five days a week.  But it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.  I reveled in it.  I watched movies and I wrote.  I found the Zen of doing dishes and laundry.

When my assignment in Lubbock was over, I came back to my life.  But for some reason, I had trouble bringing with me that ability to find solace in aloneness as I got back into my Albuquerque life.  It was like having a retreat, but once the retreat is over, everything reverts to normal.  But I take as inspiration a friend who, I think, has found how to put a desire for silence and aloneness in balance with his duties and activities in the world.

When I was in my twenties, I joined a Catholic volunteer organization and lived with another man and three women in Milwaukee.  All of us did some kind of social work in the community.  The other guy, TJ, and I became close.  We initially bonded when the women in our house were in an argument over something, and both of us separately left the house and ended up together at a bowling alley where we drank some beer and played video games.

I considered myself artistic and literary, an English major.  I wrote poetry.  I was shy around and about women.  TJ had been a business major, a member of a college fraternity, and he'd had a lot of girlfriends.  But he was searching.  We talked and he began writing poetry and stories.  We both were competitive, and played games to win.  He taught me euchre, and one night when I couldn't lose he got so angry that he picked up a book, the Trappist Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain, and threw it across the room.

In time, over that year, I came to consider him possibly the best friend I ever had.  He became important to me in a way that many others never had up to that point.  We were close, but we had difficult moments.  We both fell in love with one of our roommates.  It could have torn things up between us.  But that experience taught me just how emotionally fragile and immature I was, and set me on a path to some eventual inner healing.  I could have seen the situation as another competition between us, but for once TJ didn't make it that way.  In fact, both of them were generous enough to patiently put up with me until I could make peace with the situation.  That generosity made a huge impression on me.  Some years later, I was honored to be asked to be best man at their wedding.

A short time before the wedding, TJ decided to do a silent retreat at a Trappist monastery in Iowa.  How ironic since he had once thrown Thomas Merton's book forcefully into a wall.  He had flirted with the idea of becoming a priest, and I think that the retreat was a way for him to decide, once and for all, whether he really wanted marriage or to look into life as an ecclesiastic.  He was also drawn to silence.  He often spent time alone doing prayerful reflection, and certainly a Trappist monastery would offer a lot of time for silence.  His fiancee was, as you can imagine, worried about where this exploration would lead.  He did the retreat, and came home and made a decision.  He left any possibility of a path toward priesthood behind, and embarked into married life.

They had two children, both girls.  I was lucky enough to go on business trips to the East Coast where they moved and stayed with them three or four times a year.  Their youngest daughter became my godchild.  TJ became a high school teacher.  But he was troubled.  He started drinking more, and there were some signs of depression.  He sometimes spent evenings with a glass of whiskey in a darkened room, thinking and ruminating.  His wife was worried, and called me.  I offered what I could in phone talks.  He recognized what was happening, and made a decision to start counseling.  Things got better.  But it seemed that he was searching for something - that he felt in need of something that he still hadn't found.

I suggested once, when I was in a running phase, that he and I should train for a half-marathon.  I would train where I was living, and come out and run a race with him in his city.  We both trained, and we both ran.  Through running, it seemed he suddenly found what he needed.  He began training for marathons, first one, then another, then another - three or so a year.

Today, TJ seems more centered and grounded than I ever knew him to be.  He has nurtured his love of the written word, and teaches English at his high school.  He loves to try to help high schoolers see the joy in reading a great book.  His daughters are beautiful and growing.  He and his wife are busy with the girls but they make time to do things together.  He's lost his competitive edge - he doesn't even really follow his beloved football and baseball teams anymore.  He's given up drinking entirely.  And he runs.  He loves long distances, whether training or racing.  I imagine that he finally found, in running, the way to that silence, that spirituality, that way to set himself apart from the world that I think he needed.  What the Trappist monastery couldn't provide, he made for himself.

If I sound envious, I am.  I still seek a way to embrace aloneness at times and be comfortable with it and with myself.  How I beat myself for the smallest things.  If I sound admiring, I am.  I admire how he found a slice of perfection, a life in good balance.  If I sound like I miss him, I do.  I miss both him and his wife, who regardless of the years and miles apart still make me feel happy and a little more whole when I think of them.  There are few people with whom I share such a friendship.  Every time I talk with TJ now, I find he helps me briefly center myself when my problems seem overwhelming.

Everyone seeks that balance - a mixture of being of the world, and yet able to step apart from it so that it can be seen for what it is and appreciated.  A very few sequester themselves in monasteries.  Many can carve space in in the midst of the myriad activities of their lives.  Many never find that place of solace.  I am still looking for a way to make it a part of my life - to find a time and space where I can put the world aside and be comfortable with my aloneness.  I find it in pieces, but not as an everyday occurrence.  I think TJ found running to be his daily retreat into reflection, spirituality and peace.  He gives me hope that I will find my own balance one day, without having to join a Trappist monastery - instead, I'll find it within myself.  To answer LHM's question, above, I realize that I am often broken, but TJ has taught me that I can mend my brokenness by removing myself from the world for small periods, even as I remain active and engaged in my world.

If you want to know more about the Monastery of the Holy Spirit

Flickr photos of Monastery of the Holy Spirit
Journey America: Monastery of the Holy Spirit
Monastery of the Holy Spirit
Wikipedia: Monastery of the Holy Spirit

Next up: Alexander City, Alabama

Blue Highways: Conyers, Georgia

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWilliam Least Heat-Moon (LHM) spends some time at a Presbyterian cemetery and listening to repentence and the possibility of redemption on the radio.  It seems that Conyers has a lot of that, provoking me to begin what will probably be a two part thought exercise (continuing with my next post on the Monastery of the Holy Spirit) on spirituality.  I might have written about it once before, but what else do we talk about if not politics, religion and sex (and not necessarily in that order)?  Click the tiny map at right to see the exact spot of the cemetery where LHM ate breakfast.  Also, let me know you're out there - we've had over a thousand unique viewers this past month.  Thanks for reading!  Comment a hello!

Book Quote

"That morning, down on route 20 near Conyers, Georgia, while I ate breakfast in the Smyrna Presbyterian Church cemetery, I read the Scotch-Irish names on tombstones and listened to the radio.  A stained-glass voice beating repentence into the ungraced at 95.6 megahertz a second may have influenced what happened next."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 17

Old town in Conyers, Georgia. Photo by "Skarg" and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Conyers, Georgia

I can't remember if I wrote much about religion and my relationship to it in any previous post.  I've done so many now, what I remember doing and what I've actually done may be two different things.  The reason I bring it up now is that this post and the next post, based as always on the book quotes I cull from Blue Highways, will have to do with religion and spirituality and the reflections and thoughts that the quotes pull from me.

LHM briefly describes sitting in a cemetery in Conyers, in the Smyrna Presbyterian Church to be exact, eating breakfast and listening to a Christian radio station.  His choice of words is pretty meaningful..."beating repentence into the ungraced..."

The facets of religion fascinate me, and sometimes repel and horrify me.  It's amazing to me that a Christian faith that emphasizes the most empathetic, tolerant and compassionate responses to most any human situation (pretty much everything that Jesus Christ taught) and at the same time the most violent, petty, and vengeful responses to what are often relatively minor infractions (pretty much most of the Old Testament), can exist in the same faith.  It helps explain why within the Christian faith a man like Rev. Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church (warning - the link to Westboro Baptist Church may be deemed offensive and does not represent the views of this writer) can protest at the funerals of Iraq War veterans with the twisted logic that America's tolerance of homosexuality has brought God's punishment and wrath upon us, AND produce the beautiful service to humanity performed by the likes of Mother Teresa and others.

Christianity is a large tent, but the religious airwaves tend to resound, like the political airwaves, with the most conservative voices.  These are the voices that argue that if you're not Christian, you are destined for a horrible afterlife.  These are the voices that emphasize that the only true way to redemption is through acceptance of a particular Christianity, a particular Christ.  These are the voices that harangue, listing the horrors that befell people who did not believe, did not accept, and did not practice their Christianity and elevate their Christ.

As a person who is a somewhat practicing Catholic, I find these voices have gained strength in my own Church as it responds to the changes in the secular world by pulling in on itself.  Suddenly, it seems that there are litmus tests within the Catholic Church.  A true Catholic accepts what an increasingly conservative heirarchy deems to be important.  When I was growing up, the Church was a loud voice speaking out for justice for the poor, against militarism, and always for the common good.  Now, it seems that the Church speaks loudest against abortion, whispers against the death penalty, turns a blind eye toward militarism, minimizes its own mistakes and criminal actions (pedophilia) and generally conveys a "with us or against us" attitude.  How else can one interpret refusing communion to politicians and other notables who express their personal feelings on issues, silencing important thinkers within its ranks, and refusing venues to those whose opinions may be counter to the official opinion of the Church on various issues?  While the world embraces democracy, the Church remains mired in its opposite.

How interesting that LHM begins this brief exploration of spirituality in Conyers, a city that has evidently experienced mystical apparitions of Jesus and Mary - years after LHM passed through.  Christ may be the Son of God and Man, but in Catholicism, Mary is the uber-woman.  She was the virgin mother of Christ, and her compassion for humanity, even after her death, has elevated her to the highest levels.  Catholics pray to her for her intercession on their problems.  People have seen her in visions that have appeared throughout history; for example, to Juan Diego in Mexico as La Virgen de Guadalupe, or the apparitions in Medjugorje, Bosnia & Herzogovina.  It can be fodder for jokes, but people claim to have seen her visage on burnt tortillas (click here for a likeness on a cheese sandwich sold on EBay).  Her statues have been claimed to weep blood tears.  In Conyers, a housewife named Nancy Fowler claimed, starting in 1990, to receive visions and messages from the Virgin Mary.  Pilgrims flocked to Conyers to hear Mary's words, which alternately admonished and offered prayers for humanity, and warned of violent conflagrations to come.  Ms. Fowler's visions and messages lasted until 1998, when they suddenly ceased.

Where do I stand on such issues?  I consider myself spiritual, and try to be a good person. I fail sometimes, but I like to think I succeed more often than not.  I'm less enamored of the rites of my Church than I am in the actions of people within it.  I am of the opinions that humans create their own realities, though I don't question the power of faith to help guide our actions and ease our burdens.  I try to resolve the inconsistencies of messages between the Old and New Testaments by focusing on the New.  But I am uneasy with the direction my Church is going, and it shows in the fact that often I am indifferent to what is considered my Church's most important obligation - attending Mass.  I usually don't find much to inspire me in the proclaimings of a priest on the pulpit, though I can be pleasantly surprised.  I'm not a person who prays regularly, and I am skeptical of the visions and apparitions - I don't disbelieve those who argue that such things happen to people, but I am not sure they are products of divine intervention.  Perhaps it's my academic training in the sciences, or perhaps it's a deep questioning.  Or perhaps, I just don't like being told that I am wrong for exhibiting that most human of characteristics - exploring my relationship to the world and the universe and not just relying on what I'm told.

If you want to know more about Conyers

City of Conyers
Georgia Encyclopedia: Conyers
Visit Conyers
Wikipedia: Conyers

Next up:  Monastery of the Holy Spirit, near Conyers, Georgia

Blue Highways: Athens, Georgia

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWilliam Least Heat-Moon (LHM) pulls into Athens, Georgia to simply walk off his Swamp Guinea meal and sparks my reminiscences on my youthful music tastes, as well as an aside about moonflowers and romance.  To place it all in geographical context, click on the map thumbnail at right.  Leave a comment if you'd like to suggest music that I might want to hear.  As I say below, I'm open to anything.

Book Quote

"The frogs, high and low, shrilled and bellowed from the trees and ponds.  It was cool going into Athens, a city suffering from a nasty case of the sprawls.  On the University of Georgia campus, I tried to walk down Swamp Guinea's supper.  Everywhere, couples entwined like moonflower vines, each waiting for the blossom that opens only twice."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 16

An Athens, Georgia street scene

Athens, Georgia

If you ask me what I know about Athens, Georgia, I'd tell you the bands REM and the B-52s.  Really.  I didn't even know that the University of Georgia was located there.  So it's my turn to learn more about Athens.

Of course, the B-52s and REM aren't just any bands, and Athens evidently is known as "The Liverpool of the South."  But back in the early 80s, I watched an episode of Saturday Night Live and tried to make sense of what I was seeing on the television screen.  There was a band, with two women with huge hairdos making ululating sounds, and a guy yelling something about a lobster.  I thought they were the strangest thing I had ever seen, and frankly, I didn't like them.  It took me years to develop an ear for them - I saw them in concert in the early 90s and again a couple of years ago and I really enjoyed them both times. 

I felt the same way about Athens' other major contribution to music, REM.  I liked the fast tempo and catchy lyrics of It's the End of the World as We Know It, but I wasn't taken by much of the rest of their music.  Even today, I like some things by REM but am not convinced of their overall greatness.  So, by extension, it's taken me a while to appreciate Athens as remotely contributing something to my life.

My sister credits me with influencing her music tastes when she appropriated my record collection when I went to college, but I was never really sophisticated in music.  While punk bands and new wave were beginning in the late 70s and early 80s, the radio station in my little Northern California town was firmly locked in the early 70s when it played music for "the kids", and the "newer" stuff that my peers listened to was definitely of the heavy metal variety.  The most daring music played on the radio or listened to by my peers was probably Frank Zappa.  I didn't get introduced to some of the newer music coming out until I went to college and started listening to Bay Area radio stations.  My approach to music has always been like my approach to wine - I know what I like regardless of whether it is considered a desired vintage or cheap.  This has stood me in good stead, and has led me to lots of great music and an openness to pretty much everything.  When I lived in Texas, this openness led me to a lot of great singer-songwriters and when I lived in New Orleans, the whole New Orleans jazz and brass band scene.  I tend to eschew most modern pop, and look for music that is interesting and not cookie-cutter.

In the end, I came back to the B-52s, even though they eventually became pop.  My wife had a couple of their early albums, and I began to appreciate just how radical they were back in the day when I was initially dismissing them as weird.  Here are the B-52s on Saturday Night Live in 1980 - the first time I ever learned of them.  They were just becoming a national act right about the time that LHM stops in Athens.  Could it be that he might have caught some of their music, drifting with a breeze as he walked at the University of Georgia?

Switching gears a second, LHM gets a little romantic and throws a little sexual imagery in the passage above, where he equates the couples on the grass at the University of Georgia with moonflowers.  The moonflower, like it's name implies, only opens in the evening.  I remember moonflowers from when I lived in New Orleans, and they easily can be equated with romance.  When they bloom at night, they are very fragrant and along with the scent of night-blooming jasmine, they scented the air in the New Orleans neighborhood where I lived with sweetness.  It was easy, on a warm spring or hot summer night to let one's fancy run wild with imagination with those scents swirling around.

Moonflowers also figure in some voodoo that is related to romance, which again reminds me of New Orleans.  John the Conqueroo root, used in some voodoo spells and potions to aid in gambling and flirting, comes from a plant related to the moonflower.

I hope, for the sake of those sprawling couples at the University of Georgia, that blossoms opened more than twice.  But I'm sure that at a university as big as Georgia in the early 80s there were plenty of blossoms to be plucked in the moonlight.  As the B-52s sang in their Song for a Future Generation: "Let's meet, and have a baby now!"

If you want to know more about Athens

Athens Banner-Herald's Online Athens (newspaper)
Athens-Clarke County Guide
Athens World (blog)
Blogs at Online Athens
Downtown Athens
Flagpole (alternative newspaper/magazine)
The Red and Black (independent student newspaper)
University of Georgia
Visit Athens, Georgia
Wikipedia: Athens

Next up: Conyers, Georgia

Blue Highways: Swamp Guinea Fish Lodge Site?, Georgia

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWilliam Least Heat-Moon (LHM) drives into Georgia and chows down at a place called the Swamp Guinea Fish Lodge.  We munch on the fried food with him, and wash it down with some sweet tea.  At least I hope that reading this blog makes you feel as satisfied as eating fried food and drinking sweet tea.  To see where we are ingesting this fine fare, click on the map thumbnail to the right.  Leave a comment about any favorite back woods eateries you've managed to find.

Book Quote

"I was watching everyone else and didn't see the waitress standing quietly by.  Her voice was deep and soft like water moving in a cavern.  I ordered the $4.50 special.  In a few minutes she wheeled up a cart and began off-loading dinner: ham and eggs, fried catfish, fried perch fingerlings, fried shrimp, chunks of barbecued beef, fried chicken, French fries, hush puppies, a broad bowl of cole slaw, another of lemon, a quart of ice tea, a quart of ice, and an entire loaf of factory-wrapped white bread.  The table was covered."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 16

Old advertisement, including misspellings and wrong directions, for the Swamp Guinea Fish Lod

Swamp Guinea Fish Lodge Site?, Georgia

I've put a question mark in the title of this post, and on the heading here, because I'm just taking a stab in the dark as to where the Swamp Guinea Fish Lodge was located.  In the advertisement above, which was circa 1967 or so, the directions are completely wrong.  The text says that it was located 10 miles west of Athens, Georgia but a little research shows that it was actually located east of Athens, near a little town called Colbert.  With a search around that area on Google Maps, I found Swamp Guinea Road.  Given the name, and the location, I am making an assumption that the Swamp Guinea Fish Lodge, which does not exist any more, was located there.  If I'm wrong, and someone knows for sure, please let me know.

I love LHM's description of his meal at the Swamp Guinea.  Just massive amounts of fried food loaded up on the plate.  The real Southern custom of adding a loaf of white bread to the meal, the sweet tea.  The closest I've come to a meal like that is in New Mexico, where I live, when I went to a Texas style eatery called Rudy's for a barbecue meal.  I also like his description of the waitress and her voice.  I tend to have a soft spot for waitresses, and listening to one reel of the day's specials with a soft Southern voice would be like listening to music in a dream.

I'm no stranger to eating a lot.  Way back in the day, when I lived in Milwaukee, I made a trip to Illinois on a business trip and was taken to a supper club.  When I ordered the "Pork o'Plenty" plate, the waitress tried to talk me out of it.  She looked at my size, which was tall and skinny and about 150 pounds when wet back then, and didn't think I was up to the task.  When I ordered soup and salad with it, she thought I was out of my mind.  She predicted failure.  I not only ate the soup and salad, but the Pork o'Plenty plate AND a dessert.  As we left, I heard her exclaim to another waitress "we have big beefy farmboys come in here but I've never seen anyone eat like that guy."

In Texas in the 90s, when my friend Tom came to visit me and I still weighed the same, we went to the County Line Barbecue near Austin and ordered the all-you-can-eat meat deal.  Our goal was to eat enough to make them lose money.  We ate at least three portions apiece.  In New Orleans, great meals were made of all-you-can-eat crawfish, boiled in crab or crawfish boil with potatoes and corncobs and dumped out on a table covered with butcher paper.  You could find that in restaurants, but the best were in the backyard parties.  We would "pinch dem tails and suck dem heads" all night, wash it down with Abita Amber and go home stuffed.

A good fried Southern meal, so bad for you health-wise, is still just wonderful for the soul.  Cracker Barrel has tried to mainstream these types of meals with down home folksy Southern style, but you're really going to find the true atmosphere and food at places like LHM's Swamp Guinea - back country eateries that put less emphasis on the ambience and more emphasis on the food, and by doing so, create the ambience anyway.

What does the name Swamp Guinea mean?  Is it some Southern legend, like a swamp hoodoo or some other spectral spirit?  Actually, it was made up by the owner who told LHM that he needed a good name for future franchising.  Unfortunately, we cannot visit the Swamp Guinea Fish Lodge because it has gone out of business.  There is a restaurant in the nearby town of Hartwell called the Swamp Guinea Restaurant, but I can't tell if it is owned by the same person or is any way related to the defunct original.  It's a nice story, though - a mysterious name for a good local eatery out somewhere in the swamp.  I bet there's more such hidden oases of good food out there.

By the way, in my previous post I lamented my lack of knowledge of American colonial and Revolutionary War history.  The location of the present Swamp Guinea Restaurant, Hartwell, has an interesting such history of its own.  The town is named after Nancy Hart, a Revolutionary War heroine who singlehandedly captured five Tories and killed a sixth after they entered her home demanding that she cook them a meal.  She started cooking an old turkey, but secretly told her daughter to head to a distant spring and blow a conch shell for help.  She then started secretly taking the Tories' rifles and slipping them through a crack in the wall to hide them.  She was detected as she was slipping the third through, so she pulled it back and shot one of the Tories.  By then, several neighbors arrived to help, and wanted to shoot the remaining Tories, but she was merciful...she had them hanged.  It is rumored that she served as a spy for the American forces, often disguised as a man, and the local Native Americans respected her so much they called her "War Woman."  The county in which Hartwell is located, Hart County, is the only county in the state named for a woman.  Just another interesting tidbit of American history.

If you want to know more about Swamp Guinea Fish Lodge, etc.

Current Swamp Guinea Restaurant in Hartwell, Georgia
WFMU Blog:  Swamp Guinea Part I
WFMU Blog:  Swamp Guinea Part II
WFMU Blog:  Swamp Guinea Part III

Next up:  Athens, Georgia