io's shadow

From the NASA Space Advent Calendar which is HERE.

Jupiter's volcanic moon Io passing above the turbulent clouds of the giant planet, on July 24, 1996. The conspicuous black spot on Jupiter is Io's shadow. The shadow is about the same size as Io (3,640 kilometers or 2,262 miles across) and sweeps across the face of Jupiter at 17 kilometers per second (38,000 miles per hour). The smallest details visible on Io and Jupiter are about 100 miles across. Bright patches visible on Io are regions of sulfur dioxide frost. (J. Spencer, Lowell Observatory, and NASA)

"Now my whole life is this - to keep unencumbered.

The wind owns the fields where I walk and I own

nothing and am owned by nothing and

I shall never even be forgotten because no one

will ever discover me.  This is to me a source of

immense confidence." 

- Thomas Merton, Sign of Jonas

strange suns

From the NASA Space Advent Calendar which is HERE.

 A small portion of the Carina Nebula, one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy. Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The image captures the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks like arrows sailing through the air. (NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team, STScI)

If you seek a heavenly light
I, Solitude, am your professor!
I go before you into emptiness,
Raise strange suns for your new mornings,
Opening the windows
Of your innermost apartment.
WHen I, loneliness, give my special signal
Follow my silence, follow where I beckon!
Fear not, little beast, little spirit
(Thou word and animal)
I, Solitude, am angel
And have prayed in your name.

Look at the empty, wealthy night
The pilgrim moon!
I am the appointed hour, 
The "now" that cuts
Time like a blade.
I am the unexpected flash
Beyond "yes," beyond "no,"
The forerunner of the Word of God.

Follow my ways and I will lead you
To golden-haired suns,
Logos and music, blameless joys,
Innocent of questions
And beyond answers:

For I, Solitude, am thine own self:
I, Nothingness, am thy All,
I, Silence, am thy Amen!

-Thomas Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, pp. 340-341

in silence

From the NASA Space Advent Calendar which is HERE.

The star HD 44179 is surrounded by an extraordinary structure known as the Red Rectangle. It acquired its moniker because of its shape and its apparent color when seen in early images from Earth. This strikingly detailed Hubble image reveals how, when seen from space, the nebula, rather than being rectangular, is shaped like an X with additional complex structures of spaced lines of glowing gas, a little like the rungs of a ladder. The star at the center is similar to the Sun, but at the end of its lifetime, pumping out gas and other material to make the nebula, and giving it the distinctive shape. It also appears that the star is a close binary that is surrounded by a dense torus of dust -- both of which may help to explain the very curious shape. The Red Rectangle is an unusual example of what is known as a proto-planetary nebula. These are old stars, on their way to becoming planetary nebulae. Once the expulsion of mass is complete a very hot white dwarf star will remain and its brilliant ultraviolet radiation will cause the surrounding gas to glow.

The Red Rectangle is found about 2,300 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros (the Unicorn). (ESA/Hubble and NASA)

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, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, pp. 280-281

Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar

I think that the 25 photos will be updated daily at THIS LINK...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows a rare view of a pair of overlapping galaxies, called NGC 3314. The two galaxies appear to be colliding, but they are actually separated by tens of millions of light-years, or about ten times the distance between our Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. The chance alignment of the two galaxies, as seen from Earth, gives a unique look at the silhouetted spiral arms in the closer face-on spiral, NGC 3314A. The motion of the two galaxies indicates that they are both relatively undisturbed and that they are moving in markedly different directions.

 (NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and W. Keel, University of Alabama)

the happiest moment of life

“In fact no one recognises the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden moment “now”, even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: if a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.”

The Museum Of Innocence. Orhan Pamuk. 2009

HT: Neither Use Nor Ornament

we are new words for God

Early winter, 1967 - photo by Ralph Eugene Meatyard

 “Advent is the beginning of the end of all in us that is not yet Christ.” -Thomas Merton

"The poet and/or contemplative becomes herself a new word for God.  In the act of challenge and suspension of the will, of the controlling ego, the life, the concrete identity of the poet and the contemplative, becomes itself Word, becomes itself a communication.  It is God acting.  Merton's own interest in the Eastern Christian tradition justifies some connections being made between this vision of the poet and the contemplative and the deep-rooted Eastern Christian idea that the 'logos' of each item in the universe is the utterance of the Logos of God in a particular and unique way.  And I think back again to the letter to Mark van Doren: [God's] glory in me will be to receive from me something he can never receive from anyone else because it is a gift of his to me which he has never given to anyone else and never will.'

"We are to be 'new words for God' in that sense.  And we celebrate Merton partly because of the belief, which I think most Christians share, that the lives of certain people will become, in a very particular sense, 'words for God."  This life, this identity, this face, this voice, this 'tonality' of being, becomes a word from God to us, a word God addresses to us."

- Rowan Williams, A Silent Action - Engagements with Thomas Merton, p. 50

the reality and unreality of our being

Photograph by Thomas Merton

"... it is in solitude that the monk most completely comes to discover the true inner dimensions of his own being, at once "real" and "unreal".  The conviction of ones' "self" as a static, absolute and invariable reality undergoes a profound transformation and dissolves in the burning light of an altogether new and unsuspected awareness.  In this awareness we see that our "reality" is not a firmly established ego-self already attained that merely has to be perfected, but rather that we are a "nothing", a "possibility" in which the gift of creative freedom can realize itself by its response to the free gift of love and grace.  This response means accepting our loneliness and our "potentiality" as a gift and a commission, as a trust to be used - as a "talent," in the language of the parables.  Our existence is then at once terrible and precious because radically it belongs not to us but to God.  Yet it will not be fully "His" unless we freely make it "ours" and then offer it to Him in praise.  This is what Christian tradition means by "obedience to the Word of God."  The monk must learn this for himself."

-Thomas Merton, "The Spiritual Father in the Desert Tradition", Merton and Hesychasm, p. 298