As with so many in the world and church our attention has been turned towards Sydney, Australia and WYD2008.  A young friend of the monastery traveled with her youth group and as we prayed for her safety we prayed for all the pilgrims, for the generous welcome given by the Australians and for our Holy Father.  If you have not heard the theme song, we post it here.

It was expected that by the end of July the foundation for our wind turbine would be laid.  We are still awaiting a date for that to happen.  Did you see the article in the Country Gazette ?  Or the announcement made by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative?

(This was written by Sr. Bonitas last November.  We post it now since it is garden time.)

 Thank you all for all


Who could even dream that I would one day be a farmer, I, a total city girl growing amid buildings, cars, peoples and noises, computers, movies, rock music and soccer games. All my experience about “farming” was hanging around my daddy when he took care of a little flower patch at a corner of our house. Only a grammar school girl I was at that time. More “active” involvement in farming though happened during my college years, way, way back. A bunch of sisters helped a farming sister during the summer break and I was one of them for two years. That was all.

Yet, with some reason that I don’t quite know, whenever I, as a kid, went to visit my grandparents’ home in a country side, I was taken into the surroundings there—mountains, fields, small streams running around, trees of pine and oak, and the sound of cows and dogs. However, the thing that I enjoyed most was smell--the wet smell of moss and fallen leaves from the woods, the burning smell of smoke from the evening chimney...the smells of country side. Among all the smells, the smell that caught me deep was, believed or not, the smell of manure, the cow manure. Strangely, I felt that that smell of manure would heal all my hidden illness if there were any. So I stood at the open yard of my grandparents’ house and inhaled deep the smell and exhaled all the sickness within me out to the end of my breathing. Did this naïve imagination of childhood have an impact on me?

One day about five years ago, I asked Mother Agnes, “When you need somebody for the farm, would you, please, remember me?”  Did I develop a strong desire for farming over the years? Or, all of a sudden, nostalgia for farm arose within me? Compassion. It was simply from my compassion toward our farm.