practice

Practice until you see yourself in the cruelest person on Earth, in the child starving, in the political prisoner. Continue until you recognize yourself in everyone in the supermarket, on the street corner, in a concentration camp, on a leaf, in a dewdrop. Meditate until you see yourself in a speck of dust in a distant galaxy. See and listen with the whole of your being. If you are fully present, the rain of Dharma will water the deepest seeds in your consciousness, and tomorrow, while you are washing the dishes or looking at the blue sky, that seed will spring forth, and love and understanding will appear as a beautiful flower.
— Thich Nhat Hanh

HT: Faithful Dissident & Claire

Vocation to Solitude

Pictured: Odilon Redon, Silence, 1900, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, NY, US

“Vocation to Solitude — To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls up on that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars… to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into the bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of life into a living and vigilant silence.”

—Thomas Merton from Thoughts In Solitude (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956).
Pictured: Odilon Redon, Silence, 1900, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, NY, US

 

parabola-magazine 

http://faithfuldissident.tumblr.com/post/172788710405/parabola-magazine-vocation-to-solitude-to

Coretta Scott King Telegram to Gethsemani monks

Coretta Scott King’s telegram to the monks at Gethsemani on hearing of Merton’s death in December 1968.

Merton's letter to Coretta Scott King

Thomas Merton’s letter to Coretta Scott King the morning after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

The Assasination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

On hearing if Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination Thomas Merton wrote this poem:

April 4 1968     For Martin Luther King

On a rainy night
On a rainy night in April
When everybody ---
Said the minister

On a balcony
Of a hotel in Tennessee
"We come at once
Upstairs".

On a night
On a rainy night in April
When the shot was fired
Said the minister

"I've come at once upstairs
and found him lying
On the balcony  <--- after="" nbsp="" p="" the="" tornado="">he came at once upstairs"

On a --- ---
he was our hope
and we found a tornado
said the minister.

And a well dreamed white ---
said the minister
Propped a telescopic storm

and he never
(the well-deemed minister of death)
ran
ran away

And on the balcony
Said the minister
found
even lonely dying.
<--- after="" nbsp="" p="" the="" tornado="">[I am totally unsure that I have transcribed Merton's words correctly. Please check the comments for much better transcriptions of Merton's writing.]