Recently, a friend of mine sent me the hermit songs of anonymous Irish monks and scholars who, over 1000 years ago, scribbled their verses in the margins of the manuscripts that they were copying.
One of those poems translated by W. H. Auden expresses the pleasure of sitting in front of the fire beside a white cat named Pangur. Pangur, white pangur, the poem goes, how happy we are alone together, scholar and cat, each has his own work to do daily, and thus we live ever without tedium or envy.
And I linger now at the end of late winter with the monkish medieval mood of these poems, happy to adopt their spirit and re enter the isolation of winter with the cat I have, hunkering down into February withdrawal, and I sit and I write these notes with the family cat named monk lying across my forearms, and I embrace the contentment of the ancient cleric, the Irish author without him or litany, found his peace in what I imagine to have been a stark and lonely habitat warmed only by a fire within the context of his song, the true cenobitic community is not so much one of fellow monks and is not validated so much by formal liturgy, but rather a community of lone workers, a community of watchers and seekers.
The cell of winter and the simple companionship of the cat are rare gifts of seclusion and contemplation, gifts of the silent journeying into reflection from inside the shelter of shared myopia.
