Thomas Merton, the late Trappist Monk and author, has always been an inspiration to me.
I’m reading a new book about Merton’s writings about nature, in which he saw the sacred work of his God, it’s called Thomas Merton: When The Trees Say Nothing, and it was edited by Kathleen Deignan.
I think this book will inspire me even more, as I decided some years ago that it was essential that I live in nature among animals.
Merton, an author, poet, mystic and theologian, understood what so many of us have forgotten, that nature is so important to human life, to our notions of love and spirituality. Some of us have forgotten Mother Earth, and it sometimes feels as if she is forgetting us.
This passage of Merton’s is one of my favorite’s. For much of his time in Gethsemane, the monastery in Kentucky where he lived most of his life, Merton wrote and prayed in a hermitage in solitude. Often, he wrote about nature.
This passage is one of my favorites, and Ialso read it in the audio below.
“..I live in the woods out of necessity. I get out of bed in the middle of the night because it is imperative that I hear the silence of the night, alone, and with my face on the floor, say psalms, alone, in the silence of the night.
…the silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.”
Audio. My reading of..”The Forest Is My Bride.”
This quote stirred something deep within me. Thank you.
P.S. This picture put me right at the scene. Amazing how you capture it. How so many of us in the city long for nature.
How beautiful.
Thank you for sharing the Thomas Merton quote. I find it compelling that “Silence” is invoked four times as an essential companion and as a divine gift. In the ever increasingly noisy world in which I live, I need to be intentional about seeking “silence” These musings reminded me of the following from Wendell Barry. “When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” As always, your writing challenges and inspires. Thanks. Chuck