Monastic Life (and the Lack Thereof) in Metro Portland

Today is a testament to why the Portland area is in desperate need of a monastery. I woke up before 5am wide awake after six hours of sleep (what up, I know :-/ ) with nowhere to go. If I were still living in the Jackson area, then on a morning like this I'd take the opportunity to drive up to Holy Dormition and get an hour or two of prayer in (and maybe some awesome Romanian food too ;-) ) before my work day started. And I know plenty of other people who do the same thing, generally on a far more organized and disciplined basis than I do :-).

But here in Portland? God knows I'm perfectly capable of doing the reader services on my own, but do I? No. It's been over an hour now and so far I've putzed about the house and online, had my morning coffee, and generally just wasted time. I know the local Greek Orthodox church does some Matins services, but I don't go there generally and so when I wake up I don't know whether it's a day they have or don't have :-/. If there was a monastery, I would wake up on a day like this and be able to think, 'Okay, it's 4:42am. Matins starts in 18 minutes and it takes about 30 minutes to get there, so I could get most of Matins and the Hours in today!'

So, you see our great need ;-) (aka my laziness). Anyone else interested in starting a monastery in the Portland area should contact me here immediately! Once we've got enough popular demand and a few novices rounded up we can petition Holy Dormition to start a dependency out here. I don't care if it's a men's monastery or a women's (okay, I lie - women's monasteries are much cleaner and friendlier than men's in my experience :-) ) - we can go with whatever the novices' gender is :-).

Okay, instead of writing more ridiculous blogs I'm going to go and try to get a nap in before work now :-). Your prayers!