The air is chill, stirred by a breeze from the west. Jays fly about, silent. Only the wind through the trees, that gentle whoosh, that quiet shake, can be heard. The air is moist, and the smell of the forest drifts, bringing variously the aroma of soil eager for life, cedars and fir.

The spice smell of a candle fills my room, cinnamon wax finding cracks in the candle holder and pouring out onto the desk, aromatic lava.

I pour through volumes long resting in dusty shelves, finding not only research answers, but indeed my soul within. The reasons I spent more time and significantly more money in wandering halls of learning than practical decisions would encourage. I taste of worlds long since gone, echoes of which remain, but different in character and vastly different in appearance. Worlds both over-familiar and strikingly unknown.

This week I begin.

Begin to study the Gospels in depth. Not to impress a PhD, or add more letters after my own name, but instead to seek after the life which brings life, to fill my mind with more than the stories of my youth and through imagination journey back through time and discover what world it was which brought forth the Messiah.

The goal is to then translate this study, making it approachable and interesting.

Whether this becomes a way to pay for my own existence is still a question. That it is a joy beyond measure to my existence is without a doubt. For this kind of study I’ve sacrificed myself, choosing impractical paths, putting off vital stages of a normal life.

Now with encouragement and outside pressure of sorts I feel able to settle into this life with a renewed vigor. The palpable goal is to write, and produce a work worth reading. The immeasurable goal, which encourages my own heart, is to delve once again into the realities of a faith which too often drifts.

It is in this study that my soul resides, and so in delving the depths, I hope to find it once more.

At three thirty in the morning I woke up and felt it coming in the room, quiet, soft, welcomed. Cold air. Air chilled to about forty degrees filling my room with that marvelous chill, which makes me sleep sounder and wake more refreshed. I awake urged to write, to be productive, to again struggle with this present world.

Today is not going to be filled with that strain and pushing, that breaking out which makes me think of myself as Michelangelo’s unfinished slaves.

No, in my burgeoning new tradition I will continue my pilgrimage of conservative Americana holy sites. First there was Graceland all those many years ago, then my years at Wheaton with the related immersion in multiple shrines of evangelicalism, then Tombstone, where the west was won and Republicans battled Democrats in a manner strikingly comparable to today’s political climate .

Today it is to the holy shrine of the pontiff of Conservatism. To the Reagan Memorial Library and Museum I go, with companions stout and pure in doctrine. My sister-in-laws birthday you know, and this is where she wants to go.

Should be a grand day.

Cooler days mean more sleep filled nights, usually. Well, it was, only I woke up around four, with that groggy awareness which seems to allow for me only to pray. I do, only not as focused as I should.

I’m off today, for most of the week, to “the town too tough to die“. I’m not really sure what that means. My brother, older by a few years, has gotten to reading old west history. I don’t think this quite fits into his usual world history curriculum, must be a hobby on the side.

So, I suggested the town, and surprisingly, for he is very hobbitish, he took me up on the suggestion, and planned a whole week. I didn’t even need to leave secret messages on his door, nor bang on his window with my staff. He roused himself for an adventure, a quest, a pilgrimage of Western demi-gods.

Spirituality takes on a different bent on such a trip as this. A curious study to be sure, a change from the regularity of the cell. Indeed the earliest monastics prized the desert as a place of spirituality. Old caves, hidden huts, all the trappings of Egypt can be found in Americanized versions. That the goal was shameless profiteering and rampant immorality in these one time boom towns likely makes for a different aura. It would seem like a ghost town would have some measure of lingering ‘atmosphere’ of some sorts. We’ll see what kind. Temples to different gods, worship of fallen dreams, violence and greed mark these spots, but with also those who sought at least justice, and maybe their own kind of virtue.

Not the typical pilgrimage for a monastic sort, but this whole evangelical monasticism is still being worked out. I tried Graceland a decade back… that doesn’t seem appropriate, despite the name, so we’ll see how these spots resonate.

I’ll be writing, only without computer access. So, obligations met, only not posted for purview.

Should be a fun time, good quality bonding, what, what.