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 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."
The Owl House (writer's studio) 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."
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."
The author having a quiet time with her dogs 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."
The view from the monasteryHer 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 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."
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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