Photography

I always travel with a camera. Just carrying it makes me see more, because I'm always watching for shapes and shadows and different angles.

Design

I have no artistic skills at all. I can’t paint or draw or even visualize things that aren’t standing right there in front of me. If I ask my daughter to close her eyes and visualize a Christmas tree, she will describe it by size and species, saturation and hue, she’ll see ornaments and colored lights all over it, and creatures of the forest playing under it. If I try to visualize a Christmas tree, all I see is blackness – no image, no color – but I feel the concept of “treeness.” So I surround myself with images I can look at every day.

Real Estate Development

Buildings are tangible, and they can be made aesthetic. While I don’t do much of the work myself any more, I still like to get involved in the planning and design. My goal is not only to raise a house to its “highest and best use,” but to make it look good too, inside and out.

Music

You can’t be a monk without music. I’ve loved early music all my life, especially composers like Tallis and Palestrina, performers like the Tallis Scholars, the Boston Camerata, the Rose Ensemble, and the Dale Warland singers.

More than all the rest, of course, I appreciate Brian Link’s Waltham Abbey Singers, in which for the past few years I've been a self-doubting baritone. Brian, a musical genius and incurable optimist, wants to experiment with a couple of us “chestier” types, to see if he can train us down to a half-octave below low C, deeper than all but the occasional Russian bass, in the range of an eight-foot pipe-organ pipe. I see this as a wonderful new way to get the attention of students who nod and doze, and something drool.

 

Fun n' Photos