I’m heading off on a bit of a sabbatical – an “unplugged” sabbatical. The little one-room cabin has no phone, no internet, no cable, no Direct TV. If the antenna can’t pick it up, we don’t watch. Satellite radio keeps us informed.
A Caribou Coffee in town has Wi-Fi. A 28 mile round trip doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to limit checking email to once or twice per week. Even when I’m going into town for something else, I forget to grab my laptop. That is becoming unplugged, on sabbatical.
The little place by the lake has lots of physical labor involved to rouse it from its long winter’s nap. The dock is on the front lawn, the boat is in town, the screen house is in a pile in the bunk house. Leaves from last October are everywhere.
After a few days, things look like this:
But I do try to wrap up “work” around 1:00 each day, and the rest of the day is for reading, writing, fishing, sitting on the dock with a glass of wine or Scotch while watching loons and eagles in the late afternoon.
My library is being packed: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, Anne Porter’s Living Things, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, Franz Pfeiffer’s Works of Meister Eckhart. And, of course, writing materials including the slowly growing manuscript of my book.
As I rake, fish, read, or just relax, I carry with me the hundreds of men I have spoken with at the prisons, and who remain behind locked steel doors and would, to the man, so love to be doing what I’m doing. But I return to them refreshed for which we both benefit.
1500 mile round trip always asks for safe travel.
In a dim light... 
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