Adjusting to quiet

While on retreat recently, I picked up Patrick Leigh
Fermor's A Time to Keep Silence. I
was making my own transition from noisy life and noisy mind to four days of
retreat when I came upon Fermor's description of his retreat at a French
monastery in the '50s.

My adjustment process isn't as difficult as Fermor's. For
one thing, I'm retreating close to home (and not close to Paris, as is Fermor);
for another, I don't find myself having to emerge from a "monsoon" caused by a drinking
habit. (I sneak away from the monastery to find good coffee, but I have yet to
sneak in a flask of Calvados.) In part because of his ignorance of monastic
life and then his sudden immersion into it, Fermor's is a humorous but accurate
account of the transition.

Here's Fermor afer his first four days at the Abbey of St.
Wandrile de Fontanelle: