Category Archives: Right Livelihood

SHARE San Francisco

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I’ll be here next weekend (May 7):

SHARE San Francisco, Saturday, May 7th, Hub SoMa

SHARE San Francisco is convening local leaders on Saturday May 7th for a day of connection, conversation, and action to strengthen the Bay Area as a platform for sharing.

Why SHARE SF?

Cities promise broad access to the resources citizens need to create great lives and contribute to the common good. Unfortunately, this promise is rarely realized.

However, an unprecedented opportunity to strive for freedom, prosperity and sustainability through sharing has emerged due to new technologies and sharing business models, intensifying urbanization, the empowerment of women and minorities, and a new generation’s preference for access versus ownership.

With this opportunity in mind, SHARE SF invites you to explore how to strengthen the Bay Area as a platform for sharing through an all-day unconference.

via Shareable: Announcing SHARE San Francisco.

See you there?

Creating an Art Monastery

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Living in intentional community is not for everyone—the idea triggers an autoimmune response in some people, for whom it might signify the sacrifice of personal autonomy and individuality—but once you develop a taste for the stuff, it doesn’t fade. I unabashedly love it.

Since I began this blog-inquiry into monasticism just six months ago, dissecting Taoism, Vedanta, Eastern and Western Christianity, as well as the various vehicles of Buddhism into what I have called the elements of monasticism, community is an element I haven’t written about directly much at all. Yet it figures in my mind as an important piece of what all monasticisms are aiming at. For those individuals who dwell in abbeys, ashrams, friaries, priories, sketes, lavras, mathas, mandirs, koils, gompas, lamaseries, wats, viharas, community is a powerful spiritual practice.

So we’re making a monastery.

No, it’s not the one pictured above—the famous Cluny Abbey, founded in 910 by William the First of Aquitaine—which I include in this post because, although it grew into something massive (such a symbol of opulence that it was destroyed during the French Revolution), it started out modestly enough. William donated his Burgundy hunting preserve and an abbey was born.

Starting out even more modestly, we are making an Art Monastery in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I met Art Monastery Project co-founders Betsy McCall and Christopher Fülling in April of 2008, a few months after they had moved to Italy to start the pilot Art Monastery, and a couple months before I received an MBA in Sustainable Community Economic Development from BGI. I volunteered for the Art Monastery Project in Italy for 17 months out of the next two years.

Last October, I moved to the Bay Area to be with my fiancée, Phoebe, and to start a new Art Monastery here. Since then, between the 8-night Artmonk Retreat and four chapter meetings in Berkeley and San Francisco, after conversations with Phoebe, Joel, Michelle, Tom, Nancy, Annette, Derek, David, Lesley, Eden, and a dozen others, I have a rough idea for how to make it happen.

As I learned in Italy, birthing a self-sustaining community of monastically-inspired artists is an almost unbearably hard and tortuous process. Yet, as far as I and a few others are concerned, there’s nothing more valuable, nothing worthier of our time and our steady effort (aside from, perhaps, practices of contemplation and art-making).

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Five leadership secrets of the Trappist monk, in the Washington Post

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Meath Conlan posted a July 14th Washington Post article that comes close to the point of In Otherhood, learning from monastic tradition. Head over to Conlan’s blog to read “5 leadership secrets of the Trappist monk,” by Stephen Martin.

Trappist monks, Martin points out, are some of the best social entrepreneurs on the planet. It is from this perspective that he extracts some unique lessons from Trappist tradition, each of which relates to one or more of In Otherhood‘s Elements of Monasticism.

Here’s the list (with my own summaries and comments):

  • “Get (really) disciplined” – This needs no explanation [See "Elements of Monasticism » Discipline]. Some would say you discipline is a muscle you can build with practice.
  • “Throw away the key” – Learn to trust the people in your community. Build a community where you can trust people. [See "Elements of Monasticism » Community]
  • “Know your customer” - “[T]he work of monks ‘is not to be understood primarily as a product for consumers in a marketplace. …The fruits of the monk’s labor are sold as a means of livelihood, but they are sold to persons, real people with deep needs, not bottom-line consumers.’” [See "Elements of Monasticism » Right Livelihood]
  • “Shut up” – Silence would also need no explanation, but Martin is referring more to humility and renunciation. [See "Elements of Monasticism » Silence and Renunciation]
  • “Live in the margin” – Monasticism is counter-cultural, Martin suggests. “Trappists make their home in the margins. They labor in obscurity, their chosen path makes little sense to most people, and they’re criticized, sometimes even by fellow Christians, for closeting themselves away when they could be out in the world helping people with urgent problems.” Martin argues that this social status (perhaps similar to that of artists?) has helped Trappists take risks and innovate. He quotes Thomas Merton: “The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men.” [See "Elements of Monasticism » Mirror for Society"]

Getting the questions right

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Examples of the secular world learning from the world’s ancient contemplative and spiritual traditions abound.  Neuroscientists, psychologists, doctors, cognitive scientists and cosmologists are learning from inner technologies of meditation and contemplative practice.

But what of the outer, visible, measurable technologies of those traditions? How are we learning from those technologies that fit into what is broadly called monasticism? And how are we impacting them? This blog asks the question:

What can the secular world learn from monasticism?

and

What can the secular world do for monastic traditions?

Some interfaith and secular groups are already learning from monasticism.  For example, I live in an ex-Franciscan convent in Labro, Italy with a community of artists called the Art Monastery, where we live together as “artmonks”.  We are growing our own monastic order: the International Otherhood of Artmonks.

Why can’t anyone build or be part of an “otherhood”? Any community or movement—whether seculary, interfaith, or of a single spiritual tradition—can choose to benefit from the wide array of monastic technologies that humanity has produced in the past 3000+ years.

This blog is about:

  • secular monasticism,
  • and high-tech monasticism,
  • and art monasticism,
  • and religious monasticism,
  • and interfaith monasticism,
  • and scientific monasticism
  • and integral monasticism
  • and more…

This is for:

  • Artmonks and other Creative contemplatives
  • “Re-monks” (part of the Christian “new monasticism” movement)
  • Co-ops, cohousing and other intentional communities (member of intentional communities around the world)
  • Benedictine, Augustine, Franciscan monks
  • Neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, information scientists
  • Doctors and medical professionals
  • Secular buddhists
  • Regular folks who want to add a little order to their lives
  • Sufi fakirs
  • Theravadan monks, Tibetan buddhist monks, Zen monks
  • Advaita Vedantan monks, etc.
  • …

Have an idea for an otherhood you want to start?

Monasticize your community’s future. Add a little order to your life. Grow your own Otherhood.

About the author

Nathan Rosquist is a writer and composer living as an artmonk at the Art Monastery in Labro, Italy.  He has a MBA in Sustainable Community Economic Development from Bainbridge Graduate Intitute.