Appeared Jan. 31, 1999

The Register-Guard

You never know if a monk you meet might be a holy man

Side Streets by Susan Palmer / The Register-Guard

When I first saw Nick Routledge, I didn't know I was looking at a guy capable of analyzing the complexities of the Internet and the implications of the World Wide Web. I didn't know he'd written for InterActive Week and WIRED magazine.

I saw nothing that hinted ex-journalist with expertise in international banking. I saw a scruffy, barefoot fellow walking toward me on the sidewalk on a windy January Saturday.

One of Eugene's lost souls, I thought, and wondered if the tall, thin, bearded man with the slouching hat and purple scarf was at all in touch with reality.

"Aren't your feet cold?" I asked.

"Yes, they are," he said. "Very damn cold, in fact."

"Well, why don't you have shoes on?" I said.

I can't give his answer verbatim because his upper class British accent distracted me for a while. But he said something about his bare feet keeping him anchored in present experience, something about being a mendicant monk.

That's not like being a Benedictine or a Franciscan or even a Discalced Carmelite, an order of nuns and monks known for going barefoot. Mendicant means someone who begs, someone who has no personal possessions.

"What did you do during that cold spell last year?" I asked.

"I wore shoes," he said and laughed in a way that seemed to put him solidly in touch with reality.

I should confess that I have a bias toward holy men. I've never actually met one. But I've done some reading: Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu. I read about what they said and I think about being more like them.

And I also think, aren't there holy men walking around among us right now? I suppose the Dalai Lama could be a holy person. But he seems far away.

I figure that if I keep my eyes open, maybe one day I'll see one. Which is my explanation for why I asked Nick to have lunch with me. You never know when a mendicant monk might turn out to be a genuine holy man.

In the warmth of a restaurant that didn't object to Nick's bare feet, he told me tales about his life. Born in Singapore to British parents, his dad an executive of a pharmaceutical company. Raised mostly in English boarding schools. Graduated from a business school. Got a job writing for Euromoney magazine. Became a serious drinker. Got fired from his job. Moved to California. Drank himself into homelessness. Got fired a bunch more. Became enamored of the possibilities of the Internet, hired himself out as a consultant. Married twice. Divorced twice.

In the middle of all these details it occurred to me that maybe we prefer our holy men distant or even dead. That way their human frailties don't distract us from their message.

Nick has a message, a gentle one. Even back before his California life imploded he had this message. You can read about it at a Web site he curates, World3. The address is www.scribble. com/world3. There, he's assembled not only his own writing, but the writing of men he admires. Scroll down to his article "Barking Up the Wrong Hierarchy," for a taste of his thinking. Or go to www.zdnet.com/intweek/print/960708/attitude/col2.html. He talks there about the business of sharing.

If you have a computer, you might want to stop reading here and go visit those sites before you get to the next paragraph. His words reveal a man who sees interconnectedness. He seems smart, well-read, thoughtful.

But Nick's desire to make connections once got him locked up in a psychiatric institute in Los Angeles. He thought bringing some of the country's great thinkers together for a conference would be a good thing. Among those he sought were mathematician and chaos expert Ralph Abraham and WIRED executive editor Kevin Kelly. When his efforts failed he went on a hunger strike, threatening to die if the conference didn't come off.

The hunger strike scared his friends and they intervened, got him to a psychiatrist who had him locked up, put him on Haldol and told him his selflessness had reached a psychotic level.

I don't know about you, but my holy-man hopes for Nick took a beating when he got to this part of his life story. A holy man locked up and on meds? It doesn't inspire much confidence.

But Kevin Kelly, one of the targets of Nick's hunger strike, sees him as a genuine seeker.

"He's an original, very much the type of person that saints of the past were," Kelly said. "We romanticize saints, but they were odd, out of the ordinary. I think he has a genuine mystical streak, a genuine appetite for God and I have tremendous respect for that."

Nick says that when his health insurance money ran out, the psychiatrist pronounced him much less psychotic. He wound up in Eugene via an Internet friendship that turned romantic, then went sour.

His time on London's Fleet Street taught him how money works. "In business, a savage focus on the bottom line is the only thing that will win out," he said. "I couldn't see how that could be softened."

In California, he thought he'd be on the leading edge of designing Web sites. "I hoped I'd be able to cash in," he said. But it didn't work out that way.

Now, to borrow Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu's words, he navigates by the torch of chaos and doubt. He's charming as all get out and a beggar. He has a wide enough circle of friends that he always has a place to sleep and food to eat.

He follows the example of Christ, taking no thought for tomorrow and letting life's synchronicities buoy his daily passage.

"Is that what Christianity's about? Doing what you're doing?" I asked.

He took some time to answer the question, a couple of days, in fact. Then he e-mailed me the answer. "The explosive growth of Christianity owed, I sense, more to the joy found in early Christian communities than it did to stump speeches by sadhus. They were communities which proved sustainably loving. They worked."

Nick took off his shoes about 10 months ago when he met someone who suggested it would be a good learning experience.

The first thing he learned was just how much it hurts to repeatedly stub your toes. Another thing he learned was that the women in his life suddenly wanted to paint his toenails.

I don't know if Nick's a holy man.

What I do know is that a lot of people seem to like him. Sit with him at Out of the Fog cafe down on Third Avenue and you'll see how people come up to say hello, to get a hug or just smile his way.

I know he's got me thinking about gentleness, about less worry and more trust and the nature of holy people. I was telling my mother about Nick the other night. "What would happen if everybody did what he did?" I wondered. "If we all just stopped taking a thought for tomorrow? I mean, who would do the cooking? Who would feed us?"

My mother thought about it for a moment. "I suspect we'd all feed each other," she said.

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Appeared Jan 31, 1999 w/correction.