My final tasks before driving away from Nada in April 1983 were to visit the kiva-like chapel and consume the consecrated host. Then I removed the simple wooden tabernacle’s door. The door’s black wrought iron cross found a home years later on the exterior of tiny St. John of the Cross hermitage in Copper Gulch, a thousand feet above Crestone, Colorado.

I will never forget the emptiness I felt as I walked away from that Sedona tabernacle that developers would soon demolish to make way for the future: golf.

Just before the pandemic in 2020 I moved back to Arizona. Being back prompts me to share my memory of Nada Hermitage’s long-gone main house. It was named St. Exupéry, after the author of The Little Prince.  In the late sixties, Tessa lived there. Later, we monks took turns staying there to answer the only phone and welcome visitors and retreatants. The loss of Sedona is deep. But it lives in our present. The way of life that took shape in the womb of St. Exupéry continues in our little apartments on the edge of the Sonoran Desert.

For more than an hour, thunder rumbles about the valley. Heavy thunderheads hung over the north and west. Trees trembled, and the sun attempted to prevail. I went outside of St. Exupéry, the stone house I briefly occupy in Sedona, Arizona, to weed beneath the peach trees and to watch, feel, and smell the storm’s advent. Although the sun broke through in the south, it failed here. As I finished weeding out the last foxtails, the first drop hit me. I took my weed pail and trowel back to the garden, where Tessa was bent over her newly transplanted flowers at the top side of the garden. I watched her arranging mulch “nests” around her transplants, using dried grass clippings she had begged in Flagstaff.

On my way back to St. Exupéry, I heard the spattering of rain on the red dust and rock of the drive. I stood in front of the house and watched our dogs head for “the hut,” the little hermitage beside the garden. I flinched when drops penetrated my shirt and shocked my stomach and chest with their chill. St. Exupéry ‘s tin roof began to rattle its ripply rain song. Then I smelled it: wet desert, one of the most delicious fragrances on earth.

If I’m lucky enough to rise from the dead, I hope the first thing I’ll smell will be my desert-dust body revived by water; the whole dead, deserted cosmos revivified by a storm of Glory.

Staying in St. Exupéry makes me think along these lines. It rejuvenates and inspires me by its poor elegance, leisurely spaciousness, and nourishing fertility.

By poor elegance I mean what the Japanese call wabi. As I understand it, wabi refers to an epiphany that may arise in a garden or a room. The bare, worn necessities of life are lovingly arranged and ordered, with no frills, but with uncanny delicacy. The space exudes a sense of hospitable solitude. This house is not Japanese, which increases its chances of manifesting wabi because incarnation draws nourishment from local rain, sun, rock, soil, and soul.

This house is Sedona, taking flesh and spirit from right here. I look at the marks of chisels on the hand-hewn Sedona stone of the wall. The breath of Sedona enters the front door, animates the whole body of the house, and exhales through the back porch. Death resides here in the bones Tessa gathered from the surrounding desert. Large flat slabs of red rock climb one living room wall to make a fireplace. The furniture is worn with age and love. The stereo adds to the atmosphere of leisure and celebration. I experienced a poor elegance or elegant poverty when I woke up here and from bed I saw clusters of blood-red roses against a silvering dawn sky.

I have not lived with leisurely spaciousness since I left home at sixteen. I have usually lived in one room either as a student or as a monk. I love to wander through this house and experience its moods. Its office allows me to work in a neatly organized space where supplies are close at hand. I like the amphibious nature of the place. I could be a writer in this room, a cook in that one; I could curl up and read in that sofa, or dance to that music, or pray before that crucifix. Each place embodies a certain dimension of life, and I could move through all of life in one day simply by moving through this home.

A bathroom with a tub is a great space for leisure. Last night I basked in the tub while Japanese music played on the stereo. The simplicity of the bamboo flute and koto harmonize with desert simplicity. And what elegance to bathe in such rich sounds.

There is a big difference between our Southwestern simplicity and the Japanese Buddhist version. Japanese simplicity strikes me as light and airy. The physical world seems like a luminous jewel, yet fragile as a bubble, floating in an infinite Emptiness.

Southwestern simplicity is massive. I have a painting of a New Mexican village of adobe houses. The walls are spacious and bare, but weighty.  The space inside is gravid, grounded, the earthy emptiness you sense when you enter a sparsely furnished, roomy adobe home. The few chairs and tables are heavy and dark; the ceiling vigas are thick and rough. That’s St. Exupéry, with its heavy stone walls, primitive crocks and pottery, and weathered paneling. These are not the paper walls of a Japanese home.

Finally, St. Exupéry is fertile. Sterile is the last word I’d use. These walls gave birth to a way of life, a vision. They form our “mother” house. The Spiritual Life Institute was conceived in the womb of this poor, elegant, spacious, leisurely shelter. More specifically, it was for many years our mother’s house. Tessa’s stamp is on it. And there will never be another house like it. Elias, the kitchen-refectory at Nova Nada Hermitage in Nova Scotia is not a home. Nada Colorado will not have a home like this. Here is where founding crises were suffered; our dogs died here; most of us first fell in love with the Institute community here, reveling in home cooking served on the screened porch with views of mesas, red rocks, and thunderheads.

The fertility of this house reminds me of Mary, who gave birth to a Love who doesn’t die. I am sure that much of Tessa will die when we leave this house behind. The body of these buildings will disappear, but a tomb becomes a womb in Christ’s alchemy.

When I sleep here, Tate, our fifteen-year-old cat, tucks me in by licking my hands and arms. As I fall sleep, I realize that I am just beginning to fall in love with an age that is ending.