#thomasmerton

[carlmccolman]

So I gave a talk at the @writing_for_your_life Conference on “Writing as a Contemplative Practice.” Here I am, talking like I normally do with my eyes closed. It’s an introvert thing. Photos by the incomparable @kateradnc and T-Shirt but the exquisitely wonderful @franv.mccolman. Belly courtesy of too much chocolate. #writing #contemplation #spirituality #ThomasMerton #icedye (at Candler School of Theology - Emory University) https://www.instagram.com/p/CpinbAbuzYy/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[o-diariode-quem]

Meu Senhor Deus,

Não faço ideia para onde estou indo.

Não vejo a estrada à minha frente.

Não posso saber ao certo onde isso vai terminar.

Nem eu realmente me conheço,

e o fato de eu achar que estou seguindo sua vontade

não significa que estou realmente fazendo isso.

Mas acredito que o desejo de agradar você

de fato lhe agrada.

E espero ter esse desejo em tudo o que estou fazendo.

Espero nunca fazer nada além desse desejo.

— Thomas Merton

[awakenwordsnow]

How to Use The Seven Storey Mountain 

Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain is more than a memoir—it’s a guide to spiritual awakening.

This book chronicles Merton’s journey from a life of worldly pursuits to becoming a Trappist monk.

If you’re seeking clarity, direction, or a deeper connection with faith, this book can offer transformative lessons.

Here’s how you can use it to enhance your own spiritual growth.

[bdknopp]

LIBERTY…

God Bless America “The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.” ― Thomas Merton Thomas Merton, a prominent Trappist monk, writer, and mystic, teaches us that true love begins with the acceptance of others as they are, without trying to mold them into our own image. This quote serves as a reminder to…

[monasterypod]

from No Man Is an Island. This reminder, for me, is a constant call back to a bedrock of nonviolence. In the times of needing to clearly call out violence and oppression and genocide, there can be an exhaustion from working for peace. This exhaustion needs tending. Take care of yourselves friends.

#thomasmerton

#nonviolence

#peacemaking

#freepalestine

[jacobnicholasacostamisquez]

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." #Renaissance #RenaissanceThought #Humanism #Interconnectedness #Universality #WestMeetsEast #EmpiricalObservation #CriticalThinking #ThomasMerton #JohnDonne #Antiisolationism

[unfoldingnarratives]

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time #ThomasMerton #aventurasdeamigos #openstudio #puertasabiertas #zapadores #artistas #carabanchel #explorar #inspirar

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[j-nn-ly]

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

- Thomas Merton (No Man Is an Island)

[annhansonsculpture]

🌀This has certainly been my experience. While I didn’t always know where my artist journey would take me, my intuition told me it was a journey I must take, and that was enough for me. ✨I had so many puzzling mysteries in my life that troubled me and I felt lost on where to start. My art held my hand and showed me the way. My art studio was my safe haven to help figure these things out in. 🌀There are some truths too difficult and painful to approach directly. Our lives are often thick with coping mechanisms that blind us while protecting us and so, we need a different approach. ✨May your personal experience of art, whether you be an artist or an art appreciator, help you find your way💋 🌀Music: “Remember” by @iksonmusic ✨ 🌀 ✨ #annhansonart #artistsofig #artistsonig #annsdailydoodle #artistquotes #artinspiration #intuitiveartist #theartistsway #artquotes #trustyourself #lifeofanartist #artistsoninsta #artistsoninstagram #creativesoul #artinspo #artistsofinstagram #artistquote #thomasmerton #courageouscreative #artjourney #artwords #arttalk #innerwisdom #artthoughts #trustthejourney #innerresource #trustyourintuition #wisewords #innerguidance #arttherapy (at Poughkeepsie, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/ChPvP5QOxRT/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[anastpaul]

Quote/s of the Day – 20 December – '… Answer quickly, O Virgin. ...'

Quote/s of the Day – 20 December – ‘… Answer quickly, O Virgin. …’

Quote/s of the Day – 20 December – Monday of the Fourth Week of Advent, Readings: Isaiah 7: 10-14; Psalm 24: 1-6; Luke 1: 26-38 “And Mary said,‘Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.May it be to me according to your word.’” Luke 1:38 “The price of our salvationis offered to you.We shall be set free at once, if you consent.In the eternal Word of God, we all came to beand behold, we die.In your…

[ktobias98]

[canonizedandotherwise]

[pastelunicornrainbowlove]

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Thomas Merton , No Man Is an Island

[spiritpilgrim]

I love waking before sunrise. The birds all sing the most beautiful symphony to the rising of the sun. As I sit with my first cup of coffee of the day, I consider what Vivaldi must have been inspired by to Compose his Four Seasons. What it was for Monet to sit at the side of the lake staring into the water which inspired his beautiful water lilies and for Georgia O’Keefe to paint her beautiful red canna and calla lilies. I walk with a slight skipping beat in the woods — in hand and heart with the Spirit in which Gwen Frostic must have skipped too as she collected the sketches that became her iconic wood block prints. It is the Spirit of Creation and I’m grateful that I can see and feel it’s musings in sight and sinew — even as I experience the creaking joinings of well-worn age. Creative musings are ageless — the Spirit of Creation is ever appreciated. As we may capture only a brief reflection, our heart sings and we grow ever more appreciative too — chasing the musings of life and love. Come Holy Spirit. Fill us to overflowing. Teach us to ever appreciate Your muses — Your creation. Teach us to reflect them so brightly that others cannot help wanting to skip to the beat of your symphony. #spiritpilgrim #pilgrimspirit #trusttheprocess #muse #georgiaokeefe #gwenfrostic #vivaldifourseasons #sunrise #thomasmerton #2corinthians https://www.instagram.com/p/CCDliD6BBGy/?igshid=qx7yvdm3tklh

[wildstrandsblog]

Where I’ve Been

1.17.20

In the recent past I have found myself quoting George Carlin’s take on life—how we shouldn’t expect to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body but rather should be shouting out at life’s end, ‘holy shit, what a ride.’ This quote speaks to me and what I’ve seen of life many times so far but there is one further quote that hits me just as deeply and where I’ve been spending my time as of late. It shows the dichotomy that can exist in a single person. For those like me, picking up a copy of Thomas Merton's “No Man Is An Island” became another layer of a map that hadn’t been interpreted, yet. I had never read someone go to such lengths to speak about the importance of silence and how silence was the only thing that was real in the world.

It was profound for me. Merton writes, “Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement seems to ignore the tranquility of nature by pretending to have a purpose. The loud plane seems for a moment to deny the reality of the clouds and of the sky, by its direction, its noise, and its pretended strength. The silence of the sky remains when the plane has gone. The tranquility of the clouds will remain when the plane has fallen apart. It is the silence of the world that is real. Our noise, our business, our purposes, and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business, and our noise: these are the illusion.”

Over the past few years, the stress and pressure transitioning from adulthood to parenthood has been more than palpable. It has been agonizing as well as spiritually transformative. Self-guided with the help of my children, I’ve learned how to become the least resistant to this next level of transformation that has been like an infinite looking glass where I see into my past and into my children's future. It is a scary feeling, uncertainty, not knowing where you’re going and not exactly sure of where you came from.

Growing up as a child of the eighties, it wasn’t common to see parents listening to their children. The norm was the opposite in fact—children were to listen to their parents. This summer was an interesting time for my husband, children, and me. During this time I was told by my four-year old, “I’m different.” In the past, I have met him with the “normal” and perhaps prescribed answer I’ve been told before, “Yes, of course you’re different. Everyone’s different,” but this summer presented a time for me to let go of my fears, in this case—of me being different, and just ask my son, “Why? Why are you ‘different’?”

Invariably, this line of questioning always led me back to the same place each time: nowhere, nothing, and a place of silence. When I responded to my son’s question with, “Why are you ‘different’?,” his response was unexpected and, in a way, miraculous. He said, “Because of you,” swooping his face into mine with a smile. From that moment, I realized I had no more idea about what made me different. Why was that? Why didn’t I know why I was different? Because I hadn’t asked myself? “Why am I ‘different’?” Each time, no matter where the question began with my children, “Why is the sky blue?,” if I asked a question back rather than working to imprint my interpretation of the world on them, I was always led back to the same place—the silence of not knowing the world within me. It became confusing, to say the least, at times but for a parent of three boys all under the age of four who are always looking for answers, my confusion finally allowed me the freedom to say, “I don’t know,” and it was like reaching the next level of bliss.

Over Thanksgiving, I felt blessed to be given what came to me like a supernatural gift of silence. My husband and I with our three small boys traveled from our Northern Virginia home to a little house located on the Potomac River where the mouth opens up to the Chesapeake Bay. It was just the five of us. On our last night, having tired the children out finally, my husband and I had a moment to find peace sitting on the dock of our little vacation home. With the expansive water and the night sky aglow on the horizon from house lights dotting the juxtaposing side of the river, we closed our eyes to find not even the faintest sound of a ripple hitting the pilings. It was perfectly silent and perfectly still. We were a little awed to have the ability to see everything around us and, yet, have the sense of hearing none of it.

For some it might’ve been a little maddening to sense the nothingness around them. For parents of young children who talk to each other as if they are sixteen year old girls concerned with finding prom dates, silence was the sweetest friend we couldn’t hear. We relished it for the moment we could sense the eternal, only for it to be broken by a commercial jetliner flying from Reagan International Airport invisible in the cloudline. The noise almost seemed deafening compared to the silence just before it. Inevitably though, the plane moved on and the silence we longed for had never disappeared. It was there waiting patiently for us to tune in again. In that brief moment, we experienced the moment Merton had penned years ago—the plane’s illusory strength compared to that of the sky’s; the bliss of the real world for which the noise from the modern world covers up, the world of silence.

In Joseph Campbell’s final interview just before his death captured in “The Power of Myth,” he says, “I try not to guess. You know, we have a tremendous amount of information about this subject [of burials], but there is a place where the information stops. And until you have writing, you don’t know what people were thinking. All you have are significant remains of one kind or another. You can extrapolate backward, but that is dangerous. However, we do know that burials always involve the idea of the continued life beyond the visible one, of a place of being that is behind the visible plane and is somehow supportive of the visible one to which we have to relate. I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology—that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible.” Broken down to its essence, what Campbell is saying becomes clear—that the world we don’t know has long been thought not just to be a window, river, or bridge to the world we know, but its whole support.

Nowhere does this plane become most visible to me than within my own children having just arrived here from there. With that thought in mind, it’s become easier for me to believe that the order of the world I was taught growing up was actually taught in reverse. The order of the world I know was not meant for me to be the support for my children, listening to me and my interpretations of the world and how I see it. Any noise I make would be teaching them the illusion of the world we already know. No, the future of the world lies in reconfiguring that paradigm. In my moments with silence I have found that I’m here to listen to my children the same way silence is here patiently listening to me. My children are here to teach me how to become the silence we all inevitably become. We become that silence by believing that there’s more inside each of us worth listening to which we don’t already know. If we’re curious enough we follow those clues that lead us to ask another question. And so the story would go, asking ourselves and each other about our own inner lives, where we’ve been, and where we all eternally go, writing down what we find on each of our roads less traveled.

[acaringcounselor]

Love is it’s own reward #thomasmerton 🙏❤️ https://www.instagram.com/p/B7czlKSn6kG/?igshid=1vps4h5gdnt6o