I’m an artist and I still paint, but slowly, with many breaks, and sometimes in silence. My paintings have grown smaller but deeper, like the books I once consumed. All now arrive in fragments. Brain fog drifts over my thoughts, and the words swim. The floaters — those harmless and common strands of aging — have been with me since my twenties, drifting like shadows across the field of vision. Obscuring the page and meaning itself. And yet the desire remains: to see clearly, to know and create.
Into this fog, a figure enters. Not new but remembered. A monk. Not one specific man, but a composite drawn from three who shaped me in early adulthood: Monkish Francis Cornish from What’s Bred in the Bone, and Narcissus and Goldmund from Hesse’s novel. They were seekers of different kinds: the artist diving deeply into archetype, the sensualist turned penitent, and the intellectual turned abbot. Each cloistered in his own way. Each holding a mirror to some aspect of me.
 

And now I see him again — my monk — not as an escape from the world, but as a way through it.
 

His cell is quiet, lined with books and manuscripts. The light is dim, but he sees. He labors over a page not to escape the body, but to listen to it. His solitude is chosen; mine, imposed by debility. And yet, we meet — in stillness, across time.
A part of me longs to enter the moment T. S. Eliot describes in Burnt Norton:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement.  And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
 

I think of Jung’s reflections on aging: in the second half of life, the task is no longer mastery but meaning. This monk carries meaning like a chalice. Francis Cornish, whose alchemical paintings are layered with symbolic depths, reminds me that when it is true, art is an act of inner work. He shows that the work can continue even in silence, even in pain. But Cornish was a master forger who could never reveal he was the maker of his own paintings. He was alienated from his own work and mastery.

In The Inner Work of Age, Connie Zweig calls this the threshold of the Sage. Withdrawal is not retreat. It is ripening. And yet the ego resists, especially when one’s work is in the world. As a therapist, I remain immersed in the pain and process of others. Yet the tension builds: a part of me longs to retreat into theory, into solitude, into the cloister of quiet contemplation and study. Yet I also love tactile, relational work — the presence, the attunement, the humanness of it all. It is creative and often feels like art making.
 

The monk, too, knows this tension. He once lived in the world. He once felt the lure of experience. But now he writes in candlelight, transcribing from one truth into another.

Stillness and the Wolf
I watch the monk.

His silence echoes the quiet within me, but his hands move ceaselessly. That’s the difference. In his cell, he creates. Illuminated lines, carved symbols, thoughts etched with ink and intention. He is held in ascetic stillness, but it is fertile — a womb for meaning. I also dwell in a cloister of sorts, but mine feels sterile, imposed by pain and limitation. The body distracts as the mind fragments.
 

Around the monk, the space breathes. The cloister presses gently on the senses — a low murmur of other monks at work, the scratch of quills on parchment, the rhythm of sacred labor. It is not absence, but presence shaped into stillness. A pious hum of devotion.
 

And yet, even in that atmosphere, the image wavers. In the margins of ancient manuscripts, monks often painted themselves as grotesques — hunched, gaping, drunk, or laughing. A joke, perhaps, but also an admission: the holy is always in tension with the profane. The serene mask cracks. The flesh remains.
 

My own flesh insists now. The pain rises — a tide that blurs the edges of vision, interrupts the monk’s world. I cannot fully enter. The wolf is here.
 

The monk is no psychopomp of noble instinct, but the divided creature of Hesse’s Steppenwolf — part man, part beast, exiled by both. The Steppenwolf prowls through concert halls, libraries, salons, always yearning for something pure, yet shackled by his own intelligence and loneliness. So, too, does my wolf pace the edge of this vision. A creature of solitude, boxed in by culture, literature, and the ache of a body that will not obey.
 

In the modern world, serenity is scarce. As Eliot wrote, I am “distracted from distraction by distraction.” The silence I long for is broken not by noise, but by the scream of nerves, the scatter of attention, the slow erasure of faculties once vital to me: dreaming, reading, making. The monk may look serene. I am not.
 

The First Encounter
Before the monk turns, before he speaks, I remember Francis Cornish’s brother — Francis the First. The one who lived and died hidden. Deformed from birth, grotesquely twisted, he was kept from view, shrouded in secrecy. But Francis the First was not just a brother. He was a shadow — the hidden twin, the embodiment of what the world must not see.

And what if the monk is like that? What if he, too, is a shadow of myself — the part that withdraws not out of grace, but out of shame?
 

It comes to me suddenly that the monk may be an ignoble coward. A miser of energy, hoarding silence. A curator of detachment and dissociation. The grotesques in the margins of illuminated manuscripts come back to me — monks doubled over in absurd postures, slack-jawed, farting, gluttonous, human. Is that not also who he is?
 

And then he notices me.
 

His glance is sharp, appraising. There is no welcome in it. His expression is not serene, but slightly amused — as if my presence offends him. Or bores him.
 

When he finally speaks, it is not with kindness, but derision.
 

“So,” he says, “you come here like a supplicant, hoping to borrow the peace I’ve earned? You bring your noise with you — your twitching, your complaints, your ache to be seen. You want stillness without sacrifice. You want the dance, but not the vow.”
 

His voice is dry. Worn. Dismissive.
 

I flush with a stiffening shudder as pain surges. My first instinct is to retreat — to leave the vision, abandon the symbol, say this is all nonsense. But I stay. The monk’s cruelty touches something raw. Because it isn’t entirely his. It’s mine.
 

He is the part of me that despises my own weakness. The ascetic who sneers at my longing. The recluse who mocks my desire to connect. The hidden twin who hoards silence like treasure and recoils from touch. A shadow cast not by candlelight, but by contempt.
 

And yet, even in his derision, there is something honest.
 

The dance does require a vow I have not made. Or at least, a sacrifice.
 

The Emblem
Just as I prepare to turn away — stung, ashamed, ready to dissolve the vision — I notice something.
The monk’s scapular, black and heavy, shifts as he moves. And there, embroidered across his chest in fine white thread, is a wolf.

Not a naturalistic wolf, but an ornate, stylized figure — sinuous and fierce, caught mid-stride, mouth open in a silent howl or song. It is not hidden. It is not ironic. It is central.
 

A white wolf — embroidered over his heart.
 

I blink. The pain fades for a moment, overtaken by recognition. My own wolf — the solitary one, the Steppenwolf — the creature who has lived beside me in silence and sorrow, pacing the borderlands of my inner world. There he is. Not as a threat, but as a symbol woven into the monk’s robe. As part of his vow.
 

The monk sees that I’ve noticed. His expression does not soften, but he inclines his head, just slightly.
 

“You think I despise the wolf?” he says. “You mistake the vow for denial. The silence for purity. You don’t understand the cost.”
 

He turns back to his manuscript.
 

“The wolf is what guards the door.”
 

I don’t respond. I’m still staring at the emblem. My body hurts. The fog hasn’t lifted. But the vision deepens.
 

The monk, I now understand, isn’t at peace. He is disciplined. He has struck a bargain — with solitude, with the beast, with his own divided nature. The scapular is not a badge of honor. It’s a sigil of containment. The wolf is there to remind him of what lives beneath.
 

Maybe his derision was not cruelty, but challenge. A way of saying: Do not mistake the cloister for calm. Do not mistake the stillness for safety.

The wolf and the monk are both parts of me. One paces. One kneels. But they wear the same skin.
 
The Rebuke
The monk lays down his pen with deliberate care, as if every movement carries weight. He does not look at me immediately. When he does, his eyes are not kind, they are exacting.

“You think you’ve come here for peace,” he says, his voice dry as vellum. “But peace is not what you need. Or deserve.”
 

He stands. Slowly. Black robes whispering around him. The white wolf gleams faintly on his scapular — no longer a mystery, but a warning.
 

“You believe the cloister is refuge. A place to drift, to mend, to be cradled in quiet. But this—” he gestures to the walls, the silence, the candlelit desk “—is not comfort. This is abrasion.”
 

He begins to pace, hands folded behind his back like a disappointed headmaster, or worse — a sculptor inspecting a cracked stone.
 

“You do not come to the monastery to be spared. You come to be broken down. To be shaped. The flesh rebels, yes. The mind clouds. But these are the materials at hand. What else did you think I would work with — your cleverness? Your desires? Your half-formed vows?”
 

He stops in front of me.
 

“Your suffering is not special. It is raw ore.”
 

There’s a long pause. I can hear the quills scratching again in some distant cell, as if the cloister itself exhales around us.
 

“I’m not here to pity you,” he says finally. “I am your grinding stone. My task is to abrade. To wear down your surface until the gold veining begins to show.”
 

Something in me recoils. And yet, some deeper part recognizes the truth. I think of Maimas, the daimon who shaped Francis Cornish from roughness, cruelty, accident — not in spite of it, but through it. The polishing, he said, would come later.
 

“You want the monk’s peace,” he says, almost gently now. “But you haven’t earned the stillness. Not yet.”
 

He returns to his manuscript with the indifference of one who has seen a thousand initiates falter at the threshold.
 

“You want to pass through?” he murmurs without looking up. “Then offer your pain, not your poetry.”
 
In Limbo
As I reflect on this part of the vision, I feel the effects of abrasion on my soul. I once strived for mastery, much as Francis Cornish did. A line from Theodore Roethke’s The Waking occurs to me: “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.” This repeated line captures a paradox: we wake not to mastery, but to mystery. Healing is not a task to be completed but a process to be inhabited.

When I interact with the monk, he mocks. His voice cuts, his gaze appraises, but never softens. I had hoped the symbol might offer guidance or solace. Instead, I find myself rebuked — and still outside the threshold.
 

Perhaps I should have known. The monk was never meant to soothe. He is a mirror not of resolution, but of confinement. His cloister, once imagined as sacred space, now reveals itself as a trap. A pattern. A simulation of labor, of meaning, projected onto the inner walls of a psyche that has learned to cope through repetition and retreat.
 

The wolf, too, is trapped. Though embroidered over the monk’s heart like a talisman, he does not run. He does not hunt. He is stylized, stitched down — a symbol of wildness tamed and held. The monk wears him not in kinship, but in containment. These symbols are much too tidy. There’s no grit.
 

Bernardo Kastrup once described people as "Agents of Dissociation." According to him, we have no direct access to reality — only to a mental simulation projected within the confines of mind. If that is so, then what is the monk? What is this cloister? Perhaps not inner temenos but a cul-de-sac of the soul.
 

Still, the simulation feels real. The parchment under the monk’s hand. The sting of his words. The ache in my body. My longing. My vigilance.
 

Perhaps that’s the point.
 

If the monk is my creation, my symbol, then he is not mine until I claim him. Until I inhabit the world he resides in — not as guest or supplicant, but as author. And that is its own problem: can I author meaning from inside the simulation? Can the pious fool become the sacred trickster? Can the cloistered scribe become the alchemist?
 

If the monk is a projection, is his labor just distraction? Monastic repetition as a means of not-feeling, not-choosing, not-being. Is he a master of sacred craft — or merely another part of me dissociating with ornate discipline?
 

Maybe integration isn’t about taming the symbol or transforming it. Maybe it’s about dwelling in its contradiction. Allowing the monk to remain a scold, a gatekeeper, or a pious fool farting in the margins. Maybe it is enough to watch him work and know that I built this cell.

I cannot change the fact that the animal is trapped — the wolf, the monk, myself. But perhaps I can sit with that truth. Not solve it. Not escape it. Just know it.
 

For now, the vow remains unspoken. The gate remains closed. But I remain here — watching, aching, imagining — inside the simulation, and inside the self.
 

“My job was to make something of Francis with the materials I had at hand. If those materials were rough, they were good enough to grind his spirit down to a surface that showed up several veins of gold. Fine polishing will come later.”
— Daimon Maimas, What’s Bred in the Bone

Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
What’s Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies