BY FLORE
MONTAGUE CENTER
In spite of the turmoil whirling around us, there are still people who will abide to listen to what their conscience has to say. Elliot Tarry is one of them.
You might meet him outside his nearby retreat, sipping coffee for un moment de detente, paging through books, at the neighborhood friendly Book Mill.
You might hear him cutting wood by the Sawmill River, on property he caretakes there.
You might catch his glimpse, while you are walking and pondering silently over the finest details of the Medicine Wheel he built.
"Strangely enough, before coming here, someone had previously built a perfect circle of massive stones for the purpose of a campfire. I just extended its configurations into a wheel." he told me.
This modest place is not only beautiful, it retains for the fortunate visitor the basic ingredients for wandering and wondering. Like appreciating the rare gifts our blue-green planet offers to each of us!
"Aren't we all responsible to have let the earth get in such an alarming state?" Tarry asks. "This retreat is not only the ideal place to contemplate and slow down the rat race, but it has ways of refueling us, with energy."
Elliot Tarry is also a healer, a fervent believer of reshaping the sacred by expanding our perceptions. Living with simplicity in a natural environment-such as these grounds-enables him to ask less and less in terms of daily demands.
Could we temporarily live nowadays without running water, electricity, town gas, or the modern toys called commodities we have loaded up on?
Don't you think, in exchange for singing rushing water splashing at your doorsteps, the frogs at night in an a cappella concert, to be awakened by birds in the morning, would be a fair trade?
If you question where does this Earth's traveler come from? He will answer, "I was born in New Jersey, Allen Ginsberg would jokingly have said, 'in Zen New Jersey.' I am what you would call a self-taught man."
Traveling here and there, his interests became devoted to sweat lodges, Shamanism and the Far Eastern ways of seeing life. "I became a fervent advocate and protester against crimes done to humanity. Inflicted racism. The brutality of wars. Overpowering militarism.
"In the 70s, the 90s, the world appeared again to be engaged consciously with the richness of cultural diversities, the arts linked with poetry, music, filmmaking...But now?"
"It is still our own responsibility to do something about it."
How could one resist calling this little piece of land Devine?
