I stand for a moment on the flagstone pathway that curves gently through the garden to the house. The night wind has dropped away, leaving in its wake a misty hush across the woodlands. The pungent smell of damp earth and rotting leaves is in the air. Stripped of its high summer finery, the garden is all shapes and textures now— fountains of airy grasses, the shiny ovular surfaces of clipped shrubs. Splashes of color from red crabapples and cotoneaster berries and lush pink cushions of sedum flowers. A Persian parrotia, one of the first trees to flaunt its autumn foliage, is a Joseph’s coat of mingled crimsons and purples.
I am sixty-four years old, standing in half-light on a cold stone path in a garden glistening with memories and pleasures. I laid the stones for this path several decades ago while we were creating the garden from scratch amid eleven acres of woodland on a small island off Canada’s west coast. For sure this has been a path less traveled, far removed from the frenzied energy of commerce, the jostle of attainment and achievement. I’ve remained profoundly attached to this particular place, moved by it, inspired by it for decades. It is in its way as cordial as any place on earth—blessed with a benign climate that permits us to grow much of our own food, amid a richly diverse ecosystem whose plants and animals provide an ongoing engagement, and within a community of mostly caring and creative people. No matter how alluringly other options tantalize, no matter what compelling cause may require attention, the place that I share with the woman I love, this haven of natural beauty and spiritual sustenance, remains the fundament. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who was one of my early heroes, wrote in Thoughts in Solitude: “When we find our vocation—thought and life are one.” That’s a unity I frequently feel, although in my own case I’d add place, too—that thought and life and place are one.
The days, the seasons spin past at an accelerating rate, and I want to stop them, hold them, squeeze every last drop of satisfaction out of them. Already it’s abundantly clear to me that there will not be sufficient days ahead to accomplish all that I wish to do, or to savor fully all that might be savored. I’ve arrived, unexpectedly, at that point in life when it’s appropriate to reflect upon essential questions: Why am I here? How did I become who I am? Where am I going? Does any of this have meaning?
To address such personal matters publicly does not come easily to me, for I was raised to consider self-absorption, and certainly self-congratulation, unseemly, something done by braggarts and poseurs, people who were “full of themselves.” Holy Mother Church taught that pride was the deadliest of sins; humility required that we go quietly and modestly about our daily rounds, maintaining a diminished opinion of ourselves as sinners and pilgrims. Nor did respectable people air their dirty laundry in public; private business was to remain private. As the old Irish dictum had it: Whatever you say, say nothing. Behavior that has now become an accepted, indeed exalted part of the cultural landscape—the vulgar chest-thumping of new money, public disrobing by the emotionally bankrupt—was not the way of decent people. And so I proceed with my story under the keenest awareness of how slender a fault line separates candor from exhibitionism.
Intimate readings of a life may be of interest to others for various reasons. Perhaps the writer has been personally swept up in great historical events or been associated with gifted and famous persons. Or maybe the memoirist is a public personality—an actor or artist or star athlete—whose breezy reminiscences of life in the locker room or the green room are sure to captivate and possibly titillate. Perhaps religious conversion has inflamed the writer with fervent desire to spread the Word, or the great tragedy of war or pestilence has blighted the author’s life or the lives of those nearby.
My story tends more toward reflection in solitude and silence than to the clash of civilizations or the roar of the crowd. I flatter myself to think that my stony path has run through mostly holy ground, that the small signs and wonders glimpsed along the way speak more of peace than of war, more of beauty and enduring love than of those forces that seek to destroy them. It seems to me that many a life encompasses twists and turns across terrain that the traveler does not recognize or fully understand. An account such as this one—of a journey that begins and ends in wonderment—is at best a descriptive outline of certain stepping-stones across one particular bit of strange terrain. But come along with me now, if you will, for I do have a few peculiar tales to tell.
The country is holy: O bide in that country kind,
Know the green good,
Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood
Be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you
Lie in grace.
DYLANTHOMAS, “In Country Sleep”
DURING THE EUPHORIC AND TRAGIC days immediately following the Second World War, precisely one month after the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, I emerged into this world, specifically into the capable hands of a worthy English midwife. My birthplace was a century-old stone building located on a hill above Woolton Village in Merseyside, a suburb of Liverpool. The cobweb of crooked streets in which the village was enmeshed evoked a decidedly ecclesiastical tone: Saint Mary’s Crescent, Monk’s Way, Bishop’s Crescent, and Abbey Crescent. Church Road, where I was born, boasted two places of worship: a Methodist church in the village and, partway up a hill, Saint Peter’s Church of England. Our home was farther up still, at Knowle Park, a Roman Catholic convent and school for orphan girls where my father was farm bailiff. From the very beginning, everything was God. Merseyside, I later learned, was a Stone Age place, its countryside dotted with hill forts, barrows, stone circles, ancient crosses, and magical wells. Whether by accident or design, fate had dropped me into a spiritual hotbed.
Our living quarters were part of an old sandstone block building—I imagine it was the coach house of a former grand estate—that also housed the nunnery’s laundry, storage areas, and barns. One entered from the road through a Romanesque stone archway into a cobblestone courtyard. A faded photograph shows my father as a young man, my older brother, Ger, and myself at about age three standing in the courtyard posing solemnly for the camera. A flock of inquisitive ducklings is gathered at our feet. In the background a solitary turkey observes us like a suspicious old bachelor.
I retain only hazy memories of my first five years spent at Knowle Park, just a few dim glimpses, one of them around the excitement of seeing my father spearing rats with a pitchfork while a big collie barked and dashed after the scattering rodents. The chubby little fair-haired fellow in old photos doesn’t feel like me at all. I have almost no recollection of how it was to be that child— was I fretful, happy, difficult? How did I view my parents and brothers? Over half a century and many miles removed from the reality, it’s almost as though that little person was a chrysalid or larva that later metamorphosed into the being I think of as myself.
My older brother, named for Saint Gerard Majella, was nineteen months older than me, and my younger brother Brendan, named for the Irish monk and renowned navigator, was born fifteen months after me. I was never quite clear who Saint Desmond might have been and remember this causing me anxiety later on, as having a patron saint was a matter of some importance. It turns out that there seems not to have been a Saint Desmond at all, and despite a few early ventures toward sanctity, I was destined not to become