Day 1- The old Greyhound bus growled through the Tennessee countryside like a low flying dragon spewing thick smoke and an occasional backfire. I sat next to a G.I. from Kentucky who bent my ear for several miles before I took refuge in my laptop. Telling him I had some work to catch up on, I opened it up and began typing gibberish just for an excuse. He continued to talk for another ten minutes before he realized I wasn't listening. If I had to hear one more story about how the Army had screwed him, I was probably going to be charged for destroying government property. Guys like him will talk for hours about how much the Army sucks, but the minute you suggest that they quit, they look at you as if you suggested that they sell their Mothers to Saddaam Hussein.

Despite this minor annoyance, I'm looking forward to this trip. I feel as if I have been through a war, and in a sense, I guess I have. I'm headed for a monastery in the hills of Tennessee called "The Silence." I will be on sabbatical there for the next six months. My regular job is teaching civics at a high school in Eastboro, Massachusetts. I have been teaching for about four years. I started this career kind of late in life. I'm forty-two, and I didn't get my teaching degree until I was thirty-nine years old.

While I'm at the Monastery, I will be posting a daily chronicle of my experiences there onto a website on the Internet. The town where the Monastery is located is about four miles away. This part of Tennessee is rugged and beautiful. Its all hills, rushing rivers, and low mountains and has a wild and ancient look to it. As we approached the town where the Monastery is located, I was tingling with anticipation.

The bus driver stopped at a gas station where I disembarked. I asked the station attendant how to get to the Monastery and he pointed down the road. I walked slowly, carrying my bags, down the wide dusty main road in the direction he pointed. After twenty minutes of walking, I approached an entrance made out of saplings which had their bark stripped off of them and they had been fashioned and nailed together to form an ornate set of gates. They swung outward under a frame which had a wooden sign fastened to it that said, "The Silence." I pulled a cord on the side of the gate and a bell rang inside the compound. After a few minutes, I heard someone opening up the gates from the inside. A man in a shapeless brown robe opened the gate and let me in. He said that his name was Brother Tom.

Brother Tom led me to my new living quarters and helped me to get situated. My room is in the attic of an old building that looks and smells as if it was at one time a chicken coop. I have the only room in the attic and the rest of the area up here has no floorboards. I have to balance myself on the floor joists on my way to or from my room. The rest of the brethren have their sleeping quarters downstairs in this building. Brother Tom assured me that many a lay person has achieved spiritual fulfilment sleeping in this same room. I could almost here the echo of past prayers in this holy place. Brother Tom told me that he greatly admired my wardrobe, and he was sad to say that he would have to hold on to my clothing and all of the personal belongings that I had brought with me. Apparently, there is a strict dress code here, and I was given a brown frock that Brother Tom said was made of Hemp, one of the many products grown here on the Monastery farm.

Next, we went to dinner at the large community building where I will be taking all of my meals while I am at the monastary. I was introduced to the other eighteen monks, all of which greeted me with a restrained friendliness. We all said Grace, and we dug in to the food. The food, I should note, was wholesome and filling. I will have to get used to the complete lack of spices and flavorings used here. We had some ears of corn, which we ate cold and raw, and a kind of porridge of which I could not identify the contents, but it did, as they say, "stick to the ribs." After dinner, I was led to the kitchen where I was given the honor of cleaning all or the pots, pans, and dinnerware while the others attended to their evening meditations. I finished cleaning up the kitchen about eleven o'clock, and I immediately retired to my bed and fell fast asleep. I awoke in the middle of the night to a horrible burning sensation. I lit a candle and discovered that the smock I was wearing seemed to have caused a rash and hives to appear all over my body. I shucked it off and went back to sleep.

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7

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