Though it is conceivable O’Keeffe’s art might have remained obscure were it not for Stieglitz’ promotion [exploitation?], the movie barely touched on O’Keeffe’s love of solitude and her many years as an artist after Stieglitz’ death. O’Keeffe’s solitary life without Stieglitz in her beloved “far away” (New Mexico) contributed a great deal to her artistic notoriety.

But O’Keeffe was an artist and educated woman before she met Stieglitz. (They met after he showed some of her paintings in his New York gallery without her permission.) And although she lived much of her life pre-feminism, and may not have defined herself as such, O’Keeffe was a feminist in her own right. For someone growing up in a time when men still controlled most power, most assets and most women, she achieved a high level of self-sufficiency and independence.

O’Keeffe is most well known for her large paintings of flowers (with an erotic, vaginal imagery which she denied was intentional); and her representations of the New Mexico landscape and its elements. Further details of her biography are available at Wikipedia. The website of the The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has several good slideshows of her art.

O’Keeffe made it to the Most Memorable Hermits list because she valued solitude and found she could best experience it through her own creative process. This discovery occurred before she moved to the wilds of New Mexico (and before she met Stieglitz). This O’Keeffe quotation about the creation of her art is from 1915 (pre-Stieglitz):

“There was no one around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own unknown – no one to satisfy except myself.”

O’Keeffe didn’t like to sign her paintings and rarely named them herself. I suspect she is an artist who would have painted, and painted what she wanted, whether or not her efforts ever gained notoriety.

She was not a total recluse. By the time she moved to New Mexico, she was a woman of means who could hire assistance with her property. But she did learn to drive so she could travel into the far away on her own, with her paint supplies in the back of her car. Outside of her paintings – perhaps her own words give us the best sense of who she was:

“I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.”

“One day I found myself saying to myself…  I can’t live where I want to, I can’t go where I want to…I can’t do what I want to.  I can’t even say what I want to.  I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted, and that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn’t concern anybody but myself.”

“It was all so far away – there was quiet and an untouched feel to the country and I could work as I pleased.”

“I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.”

“Filling a space in a beautiful way. That is what art means to me.”

“I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore.”

“I know I can not paint a flower, I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning, but maybe in terms of paint color, I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Special thanks to Oregon hermit, artist John C., who recommended Georgia O’Keeffe for the Memorable Hermits list.

*Footnote: One irony of the Lifetime Channel’s ostensibly “pro-woman” worldview (and one reason I rarely wander there) is Lifetime’s over-emphasis on women’s successes and failures as a factor of the men in their lives – romance. On the other hand, I do appreciate the difficulty of marketing a film of a lone woman wandering around the desert with her painting supplies.  Most successful desert movies seem to require lots of horses and explosions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The film is food for thought on many levels. Noland is clearly a different man after his four years of solitude.  The life he left behind has also changed – people have moved on without him, including the love of his life.

Naturally, I was most fascinated with the challenges Noland faced while on the island. Contemplating how you would fair facing similar circumstances is part of the movie’s fun. The daily challenge of survival at a subsistence level is a lot different than choosing a comfortable level of solitude with access to modern amenities.

Would you (as Chuck Noland does) anthropomorphize a volleyball for someone to talk with?  How long would it take before you decided to risk all and leave the relative, though uncomfortable, safety of the island to challenge the sea on a rickety raft?

Personally, if there was any other life on the island (birds, rodents, or even non-toxic reptiles), I’d like to think I’d try for a relationship with one of them over talking to an inanimate object.  On the other hand, you don’t want to ultimately face having to eat a creature you’ve befriended – no protein in a volleyball.

As much as I treasure solitude, surviving at a subsistence level holds little appeal for me. It would be a laborious challenge alone – not a game like we see on television’s Survivor and Lost which were both developed after Cast Away’s success.

Although I can find genuine contentment in relative simplicity, and I’m fairly certain I could do well without much human interaction, trying to survive without books might launch my raft off the island – a library or die.

Jim Snow makes it to the Memorable Hermits list for tenacity alone. You just know trouble is brewing when Snow’s first words to his future bride are ”You talk too much.” He does his best to warm to the “civilized” family he marries into, but Tasmin is continually burdened with Snow’s inclination to just walk away when the spirit strikes or the noise overwhelms him.  He rarely feels obligated to discuss his plans or forewarn her of these departures.  I think many hermits are prone to this type of spontaneous desertion. It’s a self-preservation maneuver symptomatic of waiting too long before escaping the social tumult.

Lonesome Dove fans or anyone in the mood for a good dose of escapist fiction, should read the Berrybender Narratives.  (McMurtry claims they are the end of his fictional sojourns into 19th century America.) The other three books in the series are: By Sorrow’s River (2003), The Wandering Hill (2003) and Folly & Glory (2004).

As always, McMurtry’s multiple points of view create an engrossing portrait of an unforgiving, brutal wilderness where multiple factions and cultures battle for survival. McMurtry’s bawdy humor and social commentary soften the saga capturing the reader’s empathy for a multitude of fascinating characters, some of them fictionalized versions of historical figures.

Pragmatic self-sufficiency meets clueless self-indulgence in an untamed wilderness makes for a good yarn.

Huh? Maybe the books aren’t as escapist as I remember - I think I’ve  been watching a sequel on the news lately.

Hawkins’ work resonates with me because it integrates eastern and western spiritual wisdom, intelligently addresses the gap between science and spirituality, and beautifully articulates a spiritual point of view to help us make sense of the senseless.

Hawkins calls his spiritual practice “Devotional Non-Duality” In his own words:

“Devotional Non-Duality means to be loving and kind towards all of life (including your own) at all times, no matter what.”

Sounds like a simple goal, but not an easy one for most of us.  But that’s what spiritual work should be about – try to do better, fall back, and try to do better again. There’s never a shortage of relationships and circumstances in which to get extreme practice.

Hawkins has spent many years researching applied kinesiology and interpreting the results of the kinesiologic response as a method of differentiating truth from falsehood – a tool which he believes is available to all human beings with integrity. He has used his cumulative research to rank human emotional, pscychological and spiritual states on a logarithmic scale he calls the Map of Consciousness.

Hawkins most popular book, Power vs. Force details his interpretive work.  I’ve read several of Hawkins other books as well and thoroughly enjoyed them, though they are not all easy reads nor intended for the spiritually timid.

Hawkins can come across as a bit too eccentric for the average spiritual seeker (which is more obvious in those other books), but his lectures reveal a wonderful sense of humor about his own eccentricities, something I find very appealing. Most spiritually-learned teachers wind up being defined as (at least) eccentric – I think it’s a natural by-product of winding up “in the world, but not really of it.”

Veritas Publishing, Hawkins’ publisher, has posted some very short videos from Dr. Hawkins’ lectures on YouTube; however, they block embedding.  For those interested, the videos can be found here.

Here are some great audio excerpts of Hawkins lecturing:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Though applied kinesiology is a focal point of Hawkins work, using or practicing it is not crucial to benefiting from his spiritual writings.  Personally, I’ve played with it enough to acknowledge its existence and presumptive value, but I rarely practice or rely on it.  Hawkins’ work is, as I’ve said, interpretive.   The following videos were available on YouTube, both posted by fans of Hawkins’ work.

Demonstration of applied kinesiology muscle testing:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Double-blind test of applied kinesiology:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Merton’s poems, essays and autobiography have a unique appeal to many people of all faiths. The desire, devotion and discipline to join a religious order and dedicate one’s life to God is totally alien to most of us (including me).  But Merton beautifully describes what it means to be “called.”  He makes the resultant choices seem perfectly understandable.

Maybe one of the reasons Merton so effectively communicates his spiritual path (aside from his education in English literature) is he was drawn to Catholicism (and chose his vocation) as an adult after a tumultuous, very secular, sometimes controversial early life. (He was described by Cambridge classmates as a “womanizer.”) I always appreciate a spiritual teacher who has real experience with the pleasures and difficulties of being fully human – some time spent out there flailing around with the rest of us.  No self-righteous, judgmentalism from Thomas Merton.

Merton was a a peace activist during the Vietnam war and he was devoted to inter-faith understanding and commonalities. He drew the consternation of some Catholic higher-ups over both activities.

Merton would not have defined me as a hermit at all, but rather an individualist or recluse. He reserved the term hermit to true eremitics – those whose solitary lifestyle is singularly focused on prayer and an understanding of God. I believe his definition of hermit was inclusive of religious hermits of all faiths, however, not just Catholics.

There are so many sites devoted to Merton and his writings I won’t detail his life further. I’m just going to add a few Merton quotes of which I am particularly fond:

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.”

“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”

“In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for “finding himself.” If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.”

“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.”

“If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.”

“Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.”

“The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.”

One episode that caught my attention guest-starred the late Jeanette Nolan [1911-1998] as Dirty Sally Fergus, a cantankerous, tobacco chewing, rough-talking, hard-drinking, 60-something, junk lady who scrounged westbound, wagon-train trails for discards; and peddled her finds in Dodge City. Sally lived alone in a shack outside of town - a very memorable female hermit! And a Western written in the 1970′s, spotlighting any elderly, solitary female is as rare as those records of real-life 19th-century female hermits.

The Dirty Sally Gunsmoke episode involves a young gunfighter named Cyrus Pike (played by the late Dack Rambo) who Sally hides in her shack and nurses back to health. But it was Nolan’s fascinating Sally that drew me in to the episode. Apparently her portrayal also drew attention when originally aired. A spin-off series, Dirty Sally, evolved from the episode and ran for one 13-week season in 1974. Nolan was nominated for an Emmy for her role in the short-lived series.

Jeanette Nolan had a 70 year acting career. She was in her 60′s at the time she portrayed Dirty Sally. I have great admiration for actresses who willingly relinquish the roles of youth to become successful character actors in their elder years. In the case of Dirty Sally – Nolan actually played the role without her dentures.

Jeanette Nolan continued acting. At the age of 86 she played Robert Redford’s mother in The Horse Whisperer [1998] which was released a month before her death.

I like just about everything Anthony Hopkins does. When I think of this movie, I see Hopkins coursing the jungle with that long white hair. Actually, the primary setting of the movie is the psychiatric section of a maximum security prison where Dr. Powell is incarcerated after killing some gorilla-murderers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The movie is a psychological thriller a la One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Dr. Theo Caulder (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) is tasked with reaching out to the initially-silent Dr. Powell (Hopkins).  The movie is loosely based on the 1992 environmental sustainability novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.  The movie’s sustainability message ebbs more than it flows and Instinct was never a blockbuster; but it’s a good, winter evening’s home entertainment. Great acting is the primary sustainability element of the film.

Like many hermits, Han-Shan did not live totally without human contact. He sometimes badgered local monks and even shared his poetry with pilgrims and local villagers. Johnson reports Han-Shan even had a couple of close friends, “Big Stick (Feng-kan) and Pickup (Shih-te), two other eccentric fellows who joined the poet to become the Three Hermits of Tientai, still popular in China for their devotion to each other and cavalier attitude toward the rigidity of religious dogma.”  My kind of hermits.

The last three lines of this Han-Shan poem resonate with me - the crux of hermit psychology:

People ask the way to Cold Mountain

but roads don’t reach Cold Mountain

in summer the ice doesn’t melt

and the morning fog is too dense

how did someone like me arrive

our minds are not the same

if they were the same

you would be here

In his career as a professional investigative journalist and columnist for the Miami Herald, author Carl Hiaasen can obviously handle people and is apparently willing to ”mix-it up”  with more than a few. To quote his website bio: “Since 1985 Hiaasen has been writing a regular column, which at one time or another has pissed off just about everybody in South Florida.”

But there’s something about the motivational and reactive accuracy of Hiaasen’s Skink and Stranahan that makes me suspect Hiaasen has a hermitic streak himself.