There are, of course, the comforting and symphonic natural sounds that surround a cell in the woods: Beethoven-like bird song in major and minor scales, the bass to flute tones of breezes and winds, tree trunks creaking and branches rubbing, the gentle hum of bees.
The intent of a monk's cell is interior quiet and peace, quietness and centeredness inside yourself and the "peace beyond understanding" that fully permeates you in the confines of the cell and the expansion of universal self in rumination or meditation. The cell is small to cultivate a sense of simple living, of sacred energy condensed, of bleached bones spareness of things, of the small measure of space a man or woman truly needs to live fully in life and spirit. And there is the aloneness. Not loneliness. But being alone unto the universe of one's self: physically, emotionally, psychically, spiritually. The unending privacy of a space only you enter. It is like a planetarium, the fabulous star shows projected onto a large curving dome. And I've actually experienced this several times psychically: seeing my cell's ceiling completely open up to the more refined astral planes.

I first stepped into my own monk's cell when I was nineteen years old. It wasn't really a cell in the traditional perception of a monk's quarters: a small stone room with an arched door and pinched windows. It was an old Hawaiian dairy barn that had been converted to a work barn, then re-converted to sleeping quarters for young novices. It was painted dark brown, and had a high tin metal roof, also dark brown, with air-flow spaces at the ceiling/roof and large open doors that were always open. Basically an open air barn so there was no hope of protection from mosquitoes, bees, flies, gnats, bats and a couple of hundred other winged species. The monastery laundry, consisting of two huge, yellow washing machines and dryers, were right next to us. I fell asleep often to the rolling, tumbling sounds of those machines clunking away at all hours of day and into the night. The room wasn't split into cells with dividing walls, but simply divided by the fact your sleeping space on the floor was defined by a futon and pillow and a little area for clothes and books and a personal altar, all very low to the ground. To me, though there were two other young men in other areas of the barn, it was a cell, my first monk's quarters. There was a woven basket with plumeria and hibiscus flowers and papaya, bananas and star fruit waiting for me on the folded futon. I deeply savored the tiny space, and felt immensely liberated in its tightly circumscribed space. And that is the irony (or the inverse square law) of the monk's quarters. The smaller the cloister, the more liberated the spirit. I spent a year in that barn, in the same small rectangle of space, taking care of my clothes, drying myself after a shower, rising in the predawn darkness, studying by candle light, meditating and praying in a yoga-sitting posture for long hours, escaping the sleeping body into the higher dream world through that small, sacred rectangle that I kept flawlessly clean and imbued with a young monk's love of the simple and harmonious.

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