Art is a journey into the most unknown thing of all - oneself. Nobody knows his own frontiers… I don’t think I’d ever want to take a road if I knew where it led.

Louis Kahan
gacougnol: Thomas Merton [+]
solitude is a basic human reality “The solitary is one who is aware of solitude in himself as a basic and inevitable human reality, not just as something which affects him as an isolated individual.  Hence his solitude is the foundation of a deep, pure and gentle sympathy with all other men, whether or not they are capable of realizing the tragedy of their plight.  More - it is the doorway by which he enters into the mystery of God, and brings others into that mystery by the power of his love and his humility.” - Thomas Merton, Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude, in the book Disputed Questions (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1960) pp. 188-189 Photo by Thomas Merton Thank to http://fatherlouie.blogspot.ro
    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 places where men have stripped the hillside! ….Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
    Man’s loneliness is, in fact, the loneliness of God.
Photograph by Thomas Merton [+] via
O Sweet Irrational Worship

by Thomas Merton
(1915 - 1968) 

Wind and a bobwhite
And the afternoon sun.

By ceasing to question the sun
I have become light,

Bird and wind.

My leaves sing.

I am earth, earth

All these lighted things
Grow from my heart.

A tall, spare pine
Stands like the initial of my first
Name when I had one.

When I had a spirit,
When I was on fire
When this valley was
Made out of fresh air
You spoke my name
In naming Your silence:
O sweet, irrational worship!

I am earth, earth

My heart’s love
Bursts with hay and flowers.
I am a lake of blue air
In which my own appointed place
Field and valley
Stand reflected.

I am earth, earth

Out of my grass heart
Rises the bobwhite.

Out of my nameless weeds
His foolish worship.

    Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
brush drawing by Thomas Merton, “Untitled” image size: 4” h x 3 1/4” w http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html
Photo by Thomas Merton http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com
brush drawing by Thomas Merton, “Untitled” (image size: 8 1/2” h x 8 1/2” w) May 11, 1964. “The monk is a bird who flies very fast without knowing where he is going. And always arrives where he went, in peace, without knowing where he came from.” (“The Courage for Truth”, p. 198) http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html
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