![]() It’s a mighty generous hand, the girl had said, and it holds an awful lot of pennies. Which is why I’d always said it would take more than the pennies cast broadside by a generous hand throughout the world to get me to take on the job. You can’t take the statues with you, itsy-bitsy or otherwise, and a pilgrim could go mad looking for Thomas. ![]() That was how he spent the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon – he spent it. Then one afternoon he squeaked into a gap in the soil and unlocked. Thomas Merton wrote, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” Thomas said quite a lot of things, none of them worth writing down. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle or a rock. ![]() ![]() I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. ![]()
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