Tag Archives: retreat

Silence & Solitude By Ann E. Michael

Road through tunnel of colored leaves
 

Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence. James Ragan’s Too Long a Solitude. Jane Brox’s Silence: A Social History. Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude… Is it just a coincidence, or did I subconsciously start reading books dealing with silence and solitude in the weeks before I planned to spend a few days alone in a friend’s rural cabin? And will the relative silence make my somewhat maladaptiveness to busy environs even worse? For I freely admit that living for thirty years in an area that borders on the rural, and spending so much of my time … Continue reading Silence & Solitude By Ann E. Michael

A Place to Take Stock


 

  Every year, my husband and I spend two weeks at a 70-year-old cabin in the Allegheny Mountains, west of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. I have been going there since the summer after I graduated from college, when the cabin had no electricity, plumbing or running water. But 100 feet off our back porch was the constant, comforting sound of the Maury River flowing through the mountain pass where the cabin was built—a sound that more than made up for the lack of 20th-century conveniences. Now, 40 years later, the cabin still has no … Continue reading A Place to Take Stock