Here I found a spiritual tradition that, at its deepest and most creative, expressed an attitude of radical openness to the life of the other, to the world as a whole.

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

The spiritual character of paying attention, I realized, could not be easily distinguished from its aesthetic and moral character.

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

the simple beauty of the sacramental vision of reality, in which every particular thing in the physical world was seen as reflecting and revealing the sacred—and thus possessing inherent dignity and value;

“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.

I also came to see that the quality of attention the monks cultivated in their contemplative practice—prosoche was one of the names given to this practice—had a wider and deeper application that transcended the monastic tradition.

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