Composing a Further Life

early sessions. My involvement with Lindisfarne began in 1973, after my book
Our Own Metaphor
came out. But Lindisfarne was very important to me. There was an ongoing custom of a daily period of silent meditation in which I suppose people drew in different ways on what they had learned from these different teachers. That was my first experience of sitting and meditating in silence with a group who might have very different concepts of what they were about. But equally important was the fact that the fellows and other invited speakers spoke about their very newest ideas—discussions ranging from neuroscience to Pythagorean mysticism to microfinance—and it was a kind of annual wake-up call for me. Much of my intellectual life since then has involved continuing to learn with and from members of that group.”
    When the Long Island property was lost, the Lindisfarne residents were invited to move to a space associated with a disused church in downtown New York. The next stage involved a gift of land in Colorado, where Bill was able to begin an ambitious building program that included a beautiful meditation hall. That property was eventually transferred to a Zen community. There were also meetings held at Green Gulch Farm, a property of the San Francisco Zen Center, but over time Lindisfarne has survived only as a network of fellows, and even the fellows ceased to meet for several years, finally resuming in Santa Fe. “That’s what you’re seeing,” I said to Jane, “a new stage in the life of Lindisfarne, or maybe a new incarnation.”
    Glady was certainly right when she spoke of serendipity. When I think back over the last fifty years, I see the constant formation of circles of conversation or activism created by individuals like Glady or Bill who have an instinct for the question that comes next, circles that dissolve and re-form into new constellations. Bill Thompson had visualized creating something as solid as a medieval monastery but instead created a configuration of minds, shifting and growing as ideas were absorbed into the mainstream and new ones developed.
    Jim Morton, who is introduced in the next chapter, is one of the people I met through Lindisfarne, but he did not mention that example when he spoke of a kind of institutional crisis in our era, a weakening of trust in institutions that made the building of substantial institutions more difficult, even as acronyms and labels multiplied. It may be that the very fluidity that characterized the period was the secret of its productivity, yet I know of a number of creative thinkers from the sixties and seventies who are like Bill Thompson in wishing that what they created had been more substantial. Glady was a builder of virtual institutions, nonprofit corporations without buildings or campuses that served as frameworks for exploring different kinds of productive interactions. Lindisfarne has become a virtual association, a corporeal presence for only one week out of the year and for the rest an interweaving of ideas resonating back and forth and echoed in dozens of separate projects.
    One of the roles I have played at Lindisfarne was in insisting that younger people be brought in. Some have been sons and daughters of the original members, some have been nominated by members from among their students and younger colleagues. The original group has already lost half a dozen of its number to death and many of us are now in our seventies, but we still treasure Bill Thompson’s distinctive gift of picking up new themes of inquiry and creativity and inviting individuals who will both contribute to and learn from the work of others. Lindisfarne helped to turn me into a good listener, so that whenever I attend a Lindisfarne meeting I learn new things as the fellowship continues its process of metamorphosis, now in a new relationship with the Zen community in Santa Fe.
    As a board member, I found myself urging against attempts for the Lindisfarne Association to acquire and hold a material base, yet urging in favor of keeping the relationships alive. There is no way of knowing whether this conversation will survive its founders, “though meet we shall, and part, and meet again, / Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.” 11
    The rhythm of life includes death—multiple deaths, the deaths of parents and friends and the deaths of institutions. Exciting as it has been to see a new stage of the life cycle emerging in my own lifetime, it seems to me that the