My Hermit Hut

I've been feeling a bit nostalgic about the old meditation shed I had down at the beach, and it struck me that I've never actually posted on it, though others' huts have appeared here several times. (I did upload a named exterior shot ten years ago on Wordless Wednesday, but the others that have appeared from time to time were illustrating other topics, and so not identified.)

So in the interest of completism, here it is.

This tiny shack, the very picture of a true purist's definition of "hut", started life as my grandmother's potting shed. My grandfather carved it out of the bluff below their house, where I lived for ten years during the formative period of my Zen practice. When I arrived, the house and grounds were both in dire condition; eventually I hacked my way down to this cinderblock shanty, re-opening a steep, eroded goat trail through impenetrable brush. The door, which had been kicked in by a winter storm, and lay on floor inside; only the twisted wreckage of the lower hinge was still nominally attached.

In the intervening years blackberry and honeysuckle had invaded and filled the interior, along with bracken, lady fern, and infant trees, and the roof and wooden parts had rotted in places. Its concrete floor was completely saturated, covered with standing water and mud from infiltrated silt.

I really didn't need a place to sit, as the house – high on a bluff above the grey Pacific, with few neighbours – was already the best hermit hut in history. But rehabilitating one of my grandmother's work stations was an attractive premise, and the place would provide ground-level, fundamentally outdoor meditation, which I always prefer when available.

So I set-to, and after a lot of concentrated effort and scrounging of materials, ended up with this serviceable little squat. I even once sat an all-night sesshin there, hoping to glimpse the bear that left scat in front of it. (I didn't, but I did learn, not for the last time, that spring nights on the North Pacific are bitterly winter-cold.)

So here it is, my own hermit hut. Or to be perfectly accurate, my monastic playhouse. It might not have been strictly necessary, but I learned a lot of Zen there.