from an untitled poem

tears

.

To sing is to begin a sentence

like “I want to get well." 

I am not born for nothing
and neither are you:

Heaven never wept
over nothing.

—Thomas Merton

.

conjectures of a guilty bystander

   

.

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. 

It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… 

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

—Thomas Merton
excerpts 

.

I am not to speak to you, 

I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone, 

I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again, 

I am to see that I do not lose you.

—Walt Whitman

To A Stranger

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cosmic dancing at the level of truth, the level of source

  

.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. 

On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. 


—Cormac McCarthy
The Road

.

The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. 

Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance. 

—Thomas Merton
New Seeds of Contemplation

.

no man is an island

 

.

When going to bed, first a Mevlevî “sees with” the pillow, and then lies down. Then, when he is pulling the quilt over himself, he “sees with” that too, kissing its edge. Before he drinks water, tea or coffee, he kisses the glass: he “sees with” it.

When a Mevlevî takes a book to read, he or she “sees with” the book. After she finishes reading it, again she “sees with” the book and puts it lightly back in its place. 

She picks up the tasbīḥ (prayer beads) and “sees with” them, and when she has finished chanting, she “sees with” the tasbīḥ and puts them gently back in their place.

This practice applies to everything . . . 

—ADÜLBÂKI GÖLPINARLI
Mevlevi Adab and Customs, excerpts from the glossary
sufism.org

.

When I am not present to myself, then I am only aware of that half of me, that mode of my being which turns outward to created things. 

And then it is possible for me to lose myself among them. Then I no longer feel the deep secret pull of the gravitation of love which draws my inward self toward God. 

My will and my intelligence lose their command of the other faculties. My senses, my imagination, my emotions, scatter to pursue their various quarries all over the face of the earth. 

Recollection brings them home. It brings the outward self into line with the inward spirit, and makes my whole being answer the deep pull of love that reaches down into the mystery of God.


—Thomas Merton
No Man is an Island, excerpt 

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God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things,

though they are ignorant that this is so.

—Plotinus

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little point of nothingness

 

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There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.  

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. 

This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.  

It is, so to speak, his name written in us … like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.  

It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. 

I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. 

But the gate of heaven is everywhere.


—Thomas Merton
shining like the sun

.

space is not empty

 

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Like modern string theorists, the Dogon say that, conceptually, prior to existing as particles, matter exists as primordial threads, which are effectively woven into matter. Each thread is said to pass through a series of 7 vibrations inside a tiny egg, which the Dogon call The Po Pilu and which we take as a likely counterpart to the tiny, wrapped-up bundles of seven dimensions in string theory or torsion theory called the Calabi-Yau Space. 

It is this component of matter that the Dogon Priests call the egg of the world and describe as a pivotal component of matter to be found in the world just 'below' ours. The vibrations inside this egg are conceived of as seven rays of a star of increasing length and are represented by yet another Dogon drawing. The figures of this drawing are read from right to left, like Egyptian glyphs as they are arranged in some inscriptions or like the letters of a traditional Hebrew text.


—Laird Scranton
The Cosmological Origins of Myth and Symbol

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Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.


—Thomas Merton

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speech pouring down

   

.

Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By ‘they’ I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.

The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.

I came up here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield […]. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the place where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!

—Thomas Merton 

Raids on the Unspeakable (1960)

.

Love is our true destiny. 

We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another.


—Thomas Merton

 

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questions

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Hearing promises and prophecies
Rudeness and apologies
Harmony and interference
I hear the calling of the singing sirens
I hear everything, anything
But silence

I could sing you many melodies
about happiness and misery
Tenderness and cold indifference
About the ending of an old alliance
But nothing can match
The silence

.

Be still
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try 
To speak your

Name.
Listen 
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not 
Think of what you are
Still less of 

What you may one day be.
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.

O be still, while
You are still alive, 
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
To be my own silence:
And this is difficult. The whole
World is secretly on fire. The stones
Burn, even the stones
They burn me. How can a man be still or
Listen to all things burning? How can he dare
To sit with them when
All their silence
Is on fire?”


—Thomas Merton
in silence

.



You are the soul of the soul of the universe,
and your name is Love.


—Rumi

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infinit(esimal

   

.

(The student) ought to succeed in noting that 

nothing of all that is from him, is him.

He, physically and mentally, is a multitude of others.

.

This "multitude of others" includes the material –the ground, one might say– which he owes to his heredity, to his atavism, then those which he has ingested, which he has inhaled from before his birth, by the help of which his body was formed, and which, assimilated by him, have become with the complex forces inherent in them, constituent parts of his being.

On the mental plane, this "multitude of others" includes many beings who are his contemporaries: people he consorts with, with whom he chats, whose actions he watches. Thus a continual inhibition is at work while the individual absorbs a part of the various energies given off by those with whom he is in contact, and these incongruous energies, installing themselves in that which he considers his "I", form there a swarming throng.


—Alexandra David-Néel
The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

.

No one thing shows the greatness and power of the human intellect or the loftiness and nobility of man more than his ability to know and to understand fully and feel strongly his own smallness. 

When, in considering the multiplicity of worlds, he feels himself to be an infinitesimal part of a globe which itself is a negligible part of one of the infinite number of systems that go to make up the world, and in considering this is astonished by his own smallness, and in feeling it deeply and regarding it intently, virtually blends into nothing, and it is as if he loses himself in the immensity of things, and finds himself as though lost in the incomprehensible vastness of existence, with this single act of thought he gives the greatest possible proof of the nobility and immense capability of his own mind, which, enclosed in such a small and negligible being, has nonetheless managed to know and understand things so superior to his own nature, and to embrace and contain this same intensity of existence and things in his thought.


—Giacomo Leopardi 
(1798 - 1837)

 

.

Love is our true destiny. 

We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone 

—we find it with another.


—Thomas Merton

 

.

 

 

telling time

  

.

.

Eternity is not a long time; rather, it is another dimension. 

It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. 

And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on. 

This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind.


—Joseph Campbell
Myths of Light

.

For the birds there is not a time that they tell,
but the point vierge between darkness and light,
between being and non-being.

You can tell yourself the time by their waking,
if you are experienced. 

But that is your folly, not theirs.


—Thomas Merton 
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

.

a song for no(body

 

.

A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.

A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.

Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eye
Someone is awake.

(No light, no gold, no name, no color
And no thought:
O, wide awake!)
A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.


—Thomas Merton

.

braiding sweetgrass

    

.

In a mist of light 

falling with the rain

I walk this ground

of which dead men

and women I have loved

are part, as they

are part of me. In earth,

in blood, in mind,

the dead and living

into each other pass,

as the living pass

in and out of loves

as stepping to a song.

The way I go is

marriage to this place,

grace beyond chance,

love’s braided dance

covering the world.

—Wendell Berry

.

When the blood of your veins returns to the sea and the dust of your bones returns to the ground, maybe then will you remember that this earth does not belong to you, you belong to this earth.

—Sweetgrass

Native American Prophet

.

pray without ceasing

   

 

 

 

 

.

What I wear is pants.

What I do is live.

How I pray is breathe.

—Thomas Merton 

.

Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.

I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.


—Wendell Berry

.

from an untitled poem

.

To sing is to begin a sentence

like “I want to get well." 

I am not born for nothing
and neither are you:

Heaven never wept
over nothing.

—Thomas Merton

.

(tears)

.