Looking Back on Ordinary Life at the Kartause

 A blog post by Joe White, Fall 2011

            Hello again. The last blog I wrote had a pretty serious tone and lest this blog be reduced to travelogues, I figure it would be good to talk a little on weekly life here at the Kartause. The hot button question last week was “Are you going anywhere this weekend or staying back?” Plenty of folks more studious than I and my compatriots stayed in Gaming during the three day weekend to prepare for finals. Tuesday the 4^th of October was the St. Francis’s feast day, necessitating a party on the lawn. We all enjoyed burgers and fries and Kartausebrau (the local microbrew) while Kevin Mahon sang and played the four songs he knows with Dave Spears offering some sax solos while Adam S played the djembe. It felt a lot like summer, being outside with music and burgers and a sunset.

            I had had the urge for a while to take a night hike up Book Mountain. I’m a big fan of hiking in the dark: there is calm in the woods like none other in the nighttime. It can be a great time for silence and contemplation. It can put peace in your soul. Unless you’re trying your best not to slip off the side of a narrow trail coming down a mountain. Aside from the somewhat terrifying descent back down, the whole experience was quite beautiful. It was my second time climbing it, first time at night. The stars shine bright enough in the town; atop Book they were brighter and more abundant. After signing the book and sharing a bottle of wonderful wine from Melk Monastary (the one we visited earlier this semester) we descended. After cleaning the dirt off our shoes, we all got pizza and a Stiegl beer to celebrate the climb.

            Alright, so it’s been about three hours of writing, pursuing other distractions and struggling to write. There really isn’t that much to say about weekday living here, usually. We study, we talk, we go to Spar, we ride bikes to eat kebabs and ice cream, and occasionally we climb mountains. Life is ordinary here but we are attempting to live it in an extraordinary way. Growing closer to Christ not only in world-shaking pilgrimages but day-by-day living, in the menial tasks of studying and cleaning, et cetera. That is the task at hand: that everyday and in everything we grow into Christ.