“Most of us have imagined what it would be like to live in a completely different way.” This is the vision that underlies the article, “Urban Hermit: A Different Way of Being in the World” by Mu Soeng (Insight Journal, 2016). Soeng is Program Director and Resident Scholar at Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. He trained in the (Korean) Zen tradition and was a monk for eleven years. In this article he writes about several types of urban hermits, from a modern-day Thoreau living in the New England woods, to a couple sharing a 350-square foot “micro-apartment” in Greenwich Village, to a wandering scholar of language & science-turned-Catholic priest. The archetypes are diverse, but all seem motivated by a common ethic: “the need to create some distance between their inner lives and the fragmentation produced by a chaotic social setting and work culture in a post-industrial society.”

I find inspiration in these lives. Nothing about my 5 computers, 3 bicycles, blogging every week-lifestyle marks me as a hermit, but I know that my meditation practice is founded on “the need to create some distance between … inner lives and … fragmentation produced by a chaotic social setting and work culture.”