In 1989 my wife, Lotti, and I bought 130 acres of land with high meadows and forest 1 1/2 miles outside of East Meredith, New York. Over the next three years we built three cottages and a larger structure with a small meditation hall as an eccumenical space for people to do solitary retreats of several weeks or longer duration. We share a background in the Vipassana, Zen, and Tibetan practices, and trust that providing an inexpensive and beautiful place for people to retreat is as valid a form of generosity as making donations to many of the wonderful groups doing service work around the world.

It is not a teaching center and there is no teacher affiliated with it. We call it either, "The Hermitage" or Dechen Choling. Retreatants need to have enough of a background in meditation to know how to conduct their own self led retreat.

In 1996 we bought land with a long boundary up against the backside of the property. These 45 acres are located in the foothills of the Caatskills, which is a mix of forest and meadows. We hoped to steward the land into the hands of someone who would appreciate having a place of sacred practice as their neighbor, and which would protect "The Hermitage" from callous development.