And yet, I have never met anyone more serious about his solitude and more uncompromisingly dedicated to the path of spiritual transformation. For those who may recognize their own faces in his mirror, it gives a whole new latitude to pursue the hermit path embracing rather than fighting the conditions of modern life. Rafe, I believe, was a dervish . The term is Sufi. Dervish is neither - or both.
Some dervishes spend their lives mostly in craggy solitude.
But under this variety of lifestyles and circumstances, there is something unmistakable that characterizes a dervish - an innermost essence that is always there, regardless of the outer expression. The dervish is drawn, almost in spite of himself, back and forth across that threshold. He or she lives at the boundary between pure solitude and the need to spill back into the world, still pointing like a weathervane in the direction of that other. Try as one might, the tension won't collapse. From the outside it looks like an unsettled life, and in some ways it certainly is.