Western Canada Poetry Tour part 3(b): Hermitage outside Muenster, Saskatchewan

I had a couple of days to kill between my last Saskatoon reading and my arrival in Edmonton, so on Mari-Lou's suggestion I stayed in a hermitage by St. Peter's College campus outside a town of about 300 or so people called Muenster, which is a couple hours north (?) of Saskatoon. It was different. It was actually quite wonderful. The hermitage was a little, little house without running water although there was electricity, basically on the edge of an expansive field - I could see for miles. I really felt, I realized for the first time, that I was in the prairies. The hermitage is there since the college is attached as I understand it to a monastery. I met some real Benedictine monks. In fact when I got off the bus there was a black robbed man standing in front of a pick up truck waiting for me. I hope it's not trite to say I found this neat. I also attended the monks nightly vespers which were quite lovely - especially the organ music. I spent those two days mostly wandering around the property during the middle of the day, feeling very small against the expansive far reaching land - oh, there's was lots of farm equipment (I took some pictures on my (cheap) digital camera, which sadly broke in my bag - then took some more on my cell - but I left the thing - that's the technical name for it I believe - that let's me upload the pics in new york). But my favourite part about it was the late afternoon/evening. I sat in the middle of a dirt road (I never heard a car by once the entire time i was there) with a bottle of Jamieson watching the sun slowly sink over the prairie-scape and listening the sounds of various birds and insects filling the air, incredibly loudly I might add. Just before the sun goes down the field glowed an unearthly (or more eartlthy than I'm used to) gold - and I felt that aliens might abduct me at any moment (perhaps they did).

On the first night after the sun went down I read the second half of Whitman's Song of Myself, having been reading it in small bits for awhile beforehand. I read this (long) poem about six or so years ago - and while I liked it then, I felt it was naive or something. Re-reading I realize that it was my own lack of experience - of simply not having probed those depths of human experience that made me think that - and now I feel that I have at least skimmed the surface of some of where Walt has been. But reading the poem out there, in all that isolation I felt really inside that poem - or at least parts of it - especially his engagement with time itself, like "My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,/On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps/All below duly traveled–and still I mount and mount." I woke the next day with my usual worries and anxieties and wondered how much of Walt's life was spent living in the sheer enlightenment of that poem. It was interesting also being in this religious - that is Christian environment and contrasting that with the Whitman's spirituality, what you could call an atheist spirituality (I won't say agnostic - since he 'knows' what he believes in) and a spirituality made from and out of the self.

The second night was perhaps the perfect contrast - I went into the bar (yes, there's only one) in Muenster. No one was in there but the owner Ken. I had a couple of Canadians, and watched the second half of canucks game with him. I think that's the first hockey game I've watched since I was in high school. I stumbled back (I had had some jamison with my friend the sinking prairie sun before that) to the hermitage - only getting a little lost - with my flashlight beneath a star filled sky. It was beautiful, but I admit a little scary since there were tons of animals sounds- only birds, I think. And at one point the branches above shook and I could heard a bird, perhaps an owl, was really close to me, but couldn't see him/her.

So that was my hermit experience. I imagine there's a poem in there, a nature poem... a prairie poem.

Hey, I've caught up in the blogs. Next entry will be about Edmonton, and will probably contain several mentions of the fact it has snowed twice here now.