contemplative ecology

The great storyteller of “Monk's pond” had no story to tell anymore; he was simply attending to the “wild being” he shared with creation, sensing it a “strange awakening to find the sky inside you and beneath you and above you and all around you so that your spirit is one with the sky” (SJ, p. 340).

Merton had recovered the Tao, the way of nature, in all its immediacy and transformative power, by the practice of self-forgetful attentiveness to creation that drew him out of his distorting mental preoccupations. This entrainment to nature brought him to his senses, letting him experience the naked vitality of life encompassing him on all sides.

In the process his perception was washed clean of mental and emotional formations that blurred his vision of the way things really are: impermanent, empty, self-less, undying.

viriditas (Hildegard of Bingen’s description for the spiritual, healing green force of vitality imbued throughout nature).

Indoors, the church was a patriarch. But outside? The earth seemed like a mother.