Landmark
The Monastery of the Still Point
The house that keeps the Order — and the threshold by which the island is reached.
The Monastery of the Still Point stands on a terrace above the sea on the outermost ring, an open house of pale stone and quiet water. It keeps the Order whose instructors travel, under a long arrangement, to teach the discipline of the steady mind to those who must hold a course across the doors. To the Order this is a small and late use of an art they have practised since long before there were doors to point at.
Its life is plain against the splendour of the rings: the brothers and sisters of the Order keep the hours, tend the court and the lamps, and sit the long sittings of stillness for which the house is named. They are no enclosed order — they walk the bridges, attend the lectures, and teach any citizen who asks — but the deeper instruction is given slowly, and only to those judged ready to hold it.
The Monastery asks little and keeps its terms exactly; in return, after many years, it began to bring a chosen few across the water, that they might see where the teaching is from. What they were brought to is set out, as far as the Concord permits, in the pages of this portal.