Meanwhile, Merton

While I brew some blog posts, here are some Thomas Merton quotes from a collection of his wisdom called Seeds, a book I've been dipping into as I sit outside with my cup of tea at dusk and listen to the evening. (Honestly, I don't much care for the title of the book, although I couldn't tell you why. And the picture is a little strange. He looks like a construction worker in costume, although I suppose if that's indeed him then I shouldn't criticize.)

Some things are too clear to be understood, and what you think is your understanding of them is only a kind of charm, a kind of incantation in your mind concerning that thing. This is not understanding: it is something you remember.

We make ourselves real by telling the truth.

The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words...And what what we have to recover is our original unity. 

What we have to be is who we are.

The one who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much they may surround themselves with people. But the one who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with their own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God.

If you want a life of prayer, the way to get it is by praying...In technology you have this horizontal progress, where you must start at one point and move to another and then another. But that is not the way to build a life of prayer. 

In prayer we discover what we already have. 

You start where you are and you deepen what you already have. 

And you realize that you are already there.