The Practice
The Continuance is a practical tradition. It asks for regular attendance, honest participation, and a share of the work. It does not ask for belief. What it asks is held daily, and on the days when it cannot be held it is carried by somebody else.
Principle
To perceive without immediately consuming, judging, or reacting.
Attention is not concentration. Concentration narrows; attention receives. The practice begins here because nothing else can be built on a mind that arrives late to its own experience.
Principle
To act as though today belongs to the same life as tomorrow.
Most harm is done by people who have quietly decided that this week does not count. Continuity is the refusal of that exemption, held daily, in small matters, without ceremony.
Principle
To accept that a meaningful life is formed through responsibility to others.
We do not treat obligation as a burden placed on freedom. We treat it as the material from which a life is actually made. What you are obliged to, you will eventually resemble.
Structured gatherings involving silence, discussion, shared meals, and practical service. Two hours. No performance is asked of anyone present.
Three- to twelve-day stays at Continuance houses. Members share cooking, maintenance, study, and the ordinary work of keeping a building standing.
Essays, oral histories, field records, and preserved correspondence, maintained continuously since the first collection was assembled at the North House.
Food programs, restoration projects, hospice support, and community education, carried out in the places where our houses stand.
An optional written arrangement between a member and a steward covering one or more ordinary fields of work and study. No term, no stages, nothing to complete.
Published at the request of Steward G. Idris, 1993, and reviewed annually since.
We do ask that those who take part do so continuously — that attendance be a decision made once and then kept, rather than a mood renewed weekly.
Kept at every house, in local versions
A room quiet before people arrive; water heating in the kitchen; tools returned to a marked place; the weather written in the house book before a meal; a boundary note carried to the repair rota in the same week. Four shared forms account for most of it.
Twelve minutes are kept before the reading. Nothing is assigned to the silence.
At the beginning of every Open Table; first Thursday of the month at most houses.
A table, a bench, or a marked shelf where ordinary objects wait to be mended.
Standing. Cleared and entered in the ledger at the end of each season.
At the start of each season the practical boundary is walked and what is wrong with it is written down.
Four times a year, at the start of each local season.
Before the first shared meal of the month, one person writes the weather in the house book.
Monthly, before the first shared meal.
The seasons, the local variants, an example of a residential week, and the objects the houses keep in use are set out in the house year.
The rooms these things happen in, the kitchens, the maintenance schedule, and the customs each house has acquired without meaning to are set out in the life of a house, with the limits the houses keep around children, health, partnership, and death.
How a person comes to hold this work — arrival, ordinary duty, separation, return, aging, and the passing on of a duty after a death — is set out in a life in the practice.
The parts of that work which have a name and an end date — steward, convener, archivist, correspondent, and the rest — are set out with their terms and their limits in offices and their terms.
What is done when a duty is not kept, when a person is harmed, when an office is used for something it does not cover, when somebody leaves and when somebody comes back is printed entire in correction, separation, and return, together with the standing list of matters about which the Institute has no view at all.
The four hundred words read aloud before a meal come from the House Reader, an anthology in its fifth edition, which a house may cut, omit, or read something else in place of.
These are issued separately and kept here for anyone who wants them.
Terms in ordinary use at the houses. Published in the Journal since 1993.
Members beginning the practice usually start with the orientation.