This is what you shall do: Love the
earth and sun and the animals, despise
riches, give alms to every one that
asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the
people, take off your hat to nothing
known or unknown or to any man or number
of men, go freely with powerful
uneducated persons and with the young
and with the mothers of families, read
these leaves in the open air every
season of every year of your life,
reexamine all you have been told at school
or church or in any book, dismiss
whatever insults your own soul, and your
very flesh shall be a great poem and
have the richest fluency not only in its
words but in the silent lines of its
lips and face and between the lashes of
your eyes and in every motion and joint
of your body. . . .

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God. For now I know that the Creation, which at first seems to reveal Him in concepts, then seems to hide Him by the same concepts, finally is revealed in Him, by the Holy Spirit. And we who are in God find ourselves united in Him with all that springs from Him. This is prayer, and this is glory!

March 17, 1952, Thomas Merton journal entry

You led me into the trackless woods,
My falling stars, my dark endeavor.
You were bitterness, lies, a bill of goods.
You weren’t a consolation—ever.

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That blind man, standing on the bridge, as gray
as some abandoned empire’s boundary stone,
perhaps he is the one thing that never shifts,
around which the stars move in their hours,
and the motionless hub of the constellations.
For the city drifts and rushes and struts around him.

He is the just man, the immovable
set down here in many tangled streets;
the dark opening to the underworld
among a superficial generation.