Some thoughts from Thomas Merton to take with you on a summer’s day…

‘My worship is a blue sky and ten thousand crickets in the deep wet grass of the field. My vow is the silence under their Sound. I support the woodpecker and the dove. Together we learn the norms. The ploughed and planted field says: it is my turn.
And several of us begin to sing.’
Working Notebook 1965-66

‘When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you, 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 first seems to reveal Him in concepts, then seems to hide Him by the same concepts, finally is revealed in Him, in the Holy Spirit. And we who are in God find ourselves united with Him with all that springs from Him. This is prayer, and this is glory!’
Journals II

‘How absolutely central is the truth that we are first of all part of nature, though we are a very special part, that which is conscious of God.’
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
‘Let me seek, then, the gift of silence and poverty and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.’
Thoughts in Solitude

‘When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children… when… we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash – at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values… provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast out awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.’

New Seeds of Contemplation