A mutual friend showed Brother Timothy my poem after it was published in Buffalo Bones, a lit mag out of Colorado. Here follows the letter I received not long after:

Dear Adam,

It's 10pm. I just got back to my cell after watering the garden (currently 19 beds, increasing by 1-2 beds/week at the moment). At 4:30am I will get up, open the front gate, then hike up to the kitchen and cook pancakes for 40. By around 9am, the first classroom session of our summer graduate-level school of Eastern Spirituality will be beginning. Besides preparing 2 more meals and helping our contractor frame the roof of our new firehouse (we need somewhere to put our fire truck out of the weather)--which will eventually have straw-bale in-fill walls--well, I'd just be hanging around doing nothing.

Monastic life, Mt. Tabor style anyway, is pretty hectic.

Anyway, I took our 8 young summer-school students, who are here from the Ukraine, over to Ecology Action's farm for a guided tour last weekend and Cynthia gave me a copy of your letter and poem.

Maybe it's because I've spent a LOT of my life surrounded by REALLY colorful people, or maybe I'm just naive, but I tend to seriously underestimate what a strong impression I can make on most folks. You certainly most perceptively identified one of my seriously MAJOR shortcomings--which Friar Damian, my confessor, is also quite aware of--my repeated and overwhelming habit of identifying the faults of my brothers rather than working on my own. When I showed Friar Damian your poem, he said, "Boy, it's a good thing you didn't show this to the other monks!" And it was fortuitous that you didn't mention Mt. Tabor by name--if Friar Abbot ever found out about it, I'd be up Tomki Creek (local inside joke) without a prayer.

It's great to hear that you are continuing the practice of Biointensive techniques--I hope you are remembering John's admonition to grow PEOPLE--not crops or soil.

If you're ever in our neighborhood, drop by. And please keep us poor monks--especially my own wicked self--in your prayers.

In the peace and love of Jesus Christ,
Brother Timothy

P.S.: Oh yeah. The monk most prominent as the object of my wrath back during the 3-day Willits workshop is now back home with his parents in Winnipeg--still steadfastly maintaining that he is actually the only sane person in the world and of course the rest of us are seriously nuts. Please pray for him too.