The Hesychast

The heavy rain keeps pouring down on to the brim of the Hesychast’s Laredo hat. His trench coat deflects the onslaught, but his face, hands, all exposed skin, are dripping. His face does not change expression; he absorbs the rain into his soul. He becomes, “a man who is rained upon.”
The horses fidget and nay behind him; he waits, as he is. “As I am,” is who, what, where and how he is, he thinks (if you could call it thinking- it’s more like a self-acknowledgement, a sense perception of his current condition). Soon- in a week or two, perhaps, the rains will dry up and the sun will take its place, heating everything. But he considers not about a more pleasant future. Here… now… he is a man, rained upon.

He expects what is happening; he expects to be what he is. The log he sits upon, hunches over slightly, elbows on his knees, he expects it to be rough on his bottom, as it is. And when the wind picks up, freezing his face and eyes- it is so, so it is to be so.

Finally, the rain softens, the air begins to soften, and the air glimmers in the dusky light and has a sweet smell. A few relieved birds stick their heads out of the branches to sing.

He lifts his frame by pushing his hands to his knees and walks to his cabin door, and enters to make himself some tea. The remaining light from the day paints everything inside his cabin with a fine brush. The stove lights, the water steams, he pours it into his mug and sits on a kitchen bench to drink.

In the morning, after he has slept in his hard, rock bed under his wool army blanket and his one down pillow, a sleep as simple and eventless as the life of a rock, his two nephews clamber on outside his cabin. They jut their legs and arms about themselves and speak, always, excitedly, louder than The Hesychast thought they needed to. But he refuses to ask them to change- nothing is within his authority outside himself.

The nephews open The Hesychast’s cabin door in stride as they jawed at each other and entered through the doorways as ones belonging. “Where’s the coffee?” says Abbot, opening and slamming cabinet doors when the did not reveal his prize. “Hesie? You got some coffee here?”
Hesie sits up on his bed and looks over to them. “No.”

Abbot has a quizzical response on his face, “No coffee… huh.”
“Huh,” says his brother Francis, equally suspicious.