“Contemplation,” says Thomas Merton, “is essentially a listening in silence, an expectancy.”

The practice of attention, I begin to see, requires commitment and courage; also a willingness to reckon with oneself, to clarify and deepen one’s own capacity to see and cherish the world.

But places have moods. And they do not all express the same sense of hospitality.

The contemplative was invited to notice everything and to experience all things as part of a sacred whole.

However, it is also clear that, for the early Christian monks, the language of contemplation provided a way of perceiving existence that encompassed all of reality, that enabled one to attend to the most simple and mundane elements of existence and to see them as filled with significance, as sacred. It enabled one to notice and cherish the koinonia

In the tradition of ancient Christian monasticism, such awareness was called contemplation. Theoria in Greek; in Latin, contemplatio. Contemplation refers in the first instance to a particular way of seeing—arising from a pure heart—and is one of the primary ways in which the monks spoke of the ultimate aim of spiritual practice: the vision of God.

“Contemplative ecology” is a way of describing the effort to integrate these contemplative traditions into the larger work of ecological thought and renewal.

Contemplative ecology can best be understood as an expression of the diverse and wide-ranging desire emerging within contemporary culture to identify our deepest feeling for the natural world as part of a spiritual longing.

contemplative ecology—an understanding of spiritual practice that places the well-being of the natural world at the center of its concerns, and an approach to ecology that understands the work of cultivating contemplative awareness as critical and necessary to its full meaning.