God knows how to plan a vacation. A Benedictine oblate blog.

I am back from two weeks in a North Carolina cabin — thanks to the generosity of my wife’s parents.

The cabin was up a steep, winding, gravel road so just driving to and from the cabin from the main highway gave us all the sense of getting away.

While at the cabin I read “Saint John Cassian on Prayer,” translated by A.M. Casiday ISBN 9780728301665. The silence of the mountains helped me see why remote living was sought out by the earliest desert monks.

I wrote before about such remote silence not being silent at all and that such places are not inactive, but move at God’s pace. Both the God-created sounds in such silence and the pace of day are easy to see.

The songs of three or four different birds could usually be heard, there were butterflies and large moths everywhere, flowers added color where the sun hit the ground, trees towered above and all around the cabin except for the view into the valley in Haywood County, NC, USA, and the local people were especially kind to us — without exception. Mountain people deserve their reputation for neighborliness, and we hung hummingbird feeders after we saw a hummer fly up and look into our kitchen window the second day we were there.

Wishing you and I were both there!