Advent Retreat journal entry

For Advent this year, I went to retreat @ New Melleray Abbey.
I am here as I write.
The countryside is blanketed in freshly fallen snow;
a veritable sacrament of this feast of Mary's Immaculate Conception.
The silence outside is deafening;
the silence inside, pregnant.
There are no clocks here, anywhere.
None.
I looked.
Only the bells that sound the rhythm of worship.
The walls are stone, unadorned.
Stark, assaulting, unassuming beauty.
Beauty?
Yes, for somehow they say,
"Not us! Not us!
But Him who made us."
A silent Advent witness.
Silent stones bathed in the prayer of countless years.
No clocks to count.
Only bells.
And psalms in an endless procession;
chanted, spoken, murmured.
Psalmody, sung by monks who seem to defy
the clocks.
Here,
I find my life's complication and distraction
stripped away; forgotten;
or at least worn down.
I notice in the simplicity
the wilderness Voice seems audible;
or at least wilder.
Like the voice of a madman
crying out in the desert;
camel-hair clad;
divinely drunk, raw folly;
untamed by civil life
with words deadly as a knife
plunged deep within, into my heart;
threatening a thousand trifles:
repent!
I feel so alone, stripped of their cling;
but strangely, Alone.
I must go now, for the bells ring
and the clock awaits my return.