On February’s Cross Quarter Day, the sun rose between the Danielsons’ house and Lil’s house across the street. By equinox, the sun had moved a little further north and rose over just Lil’s house. At summer solstice, sunrise will occur in the northwest between Jerry and Lee’s house and Lil’s.
I use the names of the houses the way I always have for the past thirty-eight years, even though their original owners are long gone. To me, the houses are gnomons, markers with which to measure progress of the sun. But they do that only from the window of my office. Disconnected from my window, they lose their astronomical significance. If I look at Jerry and Lee’s house from the corner of Limestone and High Street, I learn nothing about the time of year. If I approach Lil’s house from the alley, I would not know anything about my place in the world.
The Trappist monks I know take a vow of stability, a vow to remain with a single community, often a single building, for the rest of their lives. For them, the sun always rises and sets in relation to the windows of their cloister. The sun on the chapel walls throughout the year is a dial of the year and of their lives, marking their time.
Within my own cell, I follow their practice. Lil is dead and her house is due east of only my window and not due east of anyone else’s window in the world. And even though I am the only one who marks Cross-quarter Day with sunrise between her house and the Danielsons’ house (and they died long ago, too), it seems to me that without that odd and arbitrary global positioning system, I would be lost.
If I moved away or became disoriented in mind or body, it seems likely that I could only find myself again from some other window on some other street, in the context of some other buildings from which to wait and see the sun rising through the year, a window from which to say, “Here I am!”
And it also seems to me that I have spent my whole life looking for and through such windows, marking whatever I needed to mark in order to keep my balance; it seems to me now that stability is far more precious than I had ever thought, and that such a monastic promise, far from being restrictive, may be the window to time and place, and possibly the only window that there is.