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A misty morning at home |
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Personal Biography
The oldest of five, Paula Huston grew up in
a family focused on the arts. "We were read to from the
time we were able to carry on a conversation," she says,
" and these were not your standard children’s books,
either, but often full-length novels by
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people like Rudyard
Kipling. I learned
very early to love
language, especially in story form." She also
learned about character; her mother often read out loud
from children’s biographies about famous artists,
inventors, scientists, and heroes. "I was infused
at a surprisingly young age—long before kindergarten,
in fact—with a lofty vision regarding human potential.
I was enthralled with what people could do if they put
their minds to it. And, of course, what I myself might
accomplish someday, if only I worked hard enough. This
heavy focus on goals and achievements later became a
terrible spiritual problem—for many years, in fact,
almost insurmountable—and it also took a very big toll
on everybody around me, but at the time (elementary
school and junior high) it helped me develop the kind of
discipline that allowed me to become a writer." |
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In addition to books, the house was filled with
music. "It was the fifties," says Paula,
"and that meant my folks had been willing to invest
in a good turn-table and stacks of classical records. I
can remember my mom and dad sitting on the sofa in the
evenings, long after we were supposed to be asleep,
listening to Smetana’s Moldau, Tchaikovsky’s Swan
Lake, the arias from Carmen."
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The Owl House (writer's studio) |
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Later, her
parents would invest in a renovated baby grand piano so
that every child in the family could take music lessons.
Paula’s youngest sister, Christina Dahl, went on to
become a professional pianist. Still, words were even more compelling than music,
and by the time she was seven, Paula had tried and
failed to write her first novel, a "pretty poor
spin-off of the Rin Tin Tin saga." She wrote all
through high school, right up to her early marriage at
nineteen. "This was a real wake-up call for me. I
always assumed I’d be going to college, maybe even
teaching at one. Instead, I found myself working
fulltime while my young husband finished school. I got a
little frantic about the way things were going,
especially five years later when my first baby was born.
It seemed that I would never get to do what I was ‘meant’
to do, that my life was already over."
Not surprisingly, the marriage eventually ended and
Paula, now the single mother of two young children, went
out to face the job market. "Another big wake-up
call—even though I’d started to publish short
fiction by then, I couldn’t get a decent salary
without a degree, and I couldn’t afford to go back to
school at this point." A few years later, however,
she married again. "Mike was a teacher and saw how
frustrated I was at not being able to use my gifts. He
encouraged me to go to college, even though I was in my
mid-thirties by then. He got the kids—they were
teenagers by now, and we had four of them—to back me
up. It was wonderful. I went straight through the
bachelor’s and master’s degree programs without a
break and eventually wound up teaching in the very same
English department where I’d taken all my
classes."
In her early forties, however, another crisis—this
time a spiritual one—hit hard. "Frankly, I’d
never had time to think about religion, not since
childhood. I’d been so engrossed in the struggle to
‘succeed’ that I couldn’t slow down long enough to
think deeply about my self as a human being. Most people
seem to get stymied by that deep identity question when
they hit middle age, even if they’d rather avoid it.
Lots of times they panic and try to rush off into
something new—a love affair, for example, or a career
change. So I was lucky that somebody wiser and more
experienced than I was recognized what was going on with
me and took me in hand. It was a life-saving act."
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The view from the monastery |
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Her mentor, a philosophy professor, introduced her to
the notion of spiritual disciplines, something she’d
never heard of before. "It was a natural fit for a
person like me—it gave me something new to work
at." In the process, however, things began to shift
internally. "I started to feel an unbelievably
strong tug toward solitude and silence. I loved my
family, my writing, my
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teaching,
but I kept being drawn
away from them. It seemed as though there was something
I needed to hear, something of urgent importance, and I
could only hear it if I were disconnected from
everything else." |
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In time, her spiritual search led her to the New
Camaldoli Hermitage at Big Sur, a community of
contemplative monks living under the Rule of St.
Benedict and the Brief Rule of St. Romuald, an 11th-century
Italian hermit. "It was really unbelievable,"
she says. "There they were, a bunch of talented,
intelligent people, devoting themselves to a simple,
anonymous life in the service of God. It completely
changed the way I saw everything. It turned me around in
my tracks."
Eventually she became an oblate of the hermitage, a
lay person who tries to shape his or her life through
adopting various monastic practices. Nowadays, she
spends most of her time at home with Mike, gardening,
writing, and trying, in the Benedictine spirit, to be a
good host to frequent guests who are drawn to their
quiet country setting. "It’s taken a complete
transformation of my original value system to get
here," she says, "and the struggle with myself
and my own need to be ‘important’ went on for many
years, but I’m finally starting to see the light at
the end of the tunnel—which is of course the light of
Christ who came to lead us out of our narrow,
self-absorbed little worlds into something greater than
we can imagine. You have to lose your life to save it,
he kept saying. That didn’t make much sense to me till
fairly recently. Thank God for the monks and all the
other people in my life who’ve helped me finally begin
to understand those mysterious words." |
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