You're walking in the forest. You find a semi-abandoned hut and sit down at the table. After drinking a glass of water and quickly meditating, you open up your notebook. The page is empty.

Thomas Merton, you tell your notebook.

Thomas Merton was a Trappist Monk, it responds - You may have already read his famous book "The Seven Storey Mountain" which

One's ability to articulate an idea always lags behind the understanding of the idea, and the understanding of an idea often lags behind the embodiment in which it is first given life. It can take a surprising amount of time to come to understand what a prototype is trying to "say", and longer still to say it oneself.

-Bret Victor

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Attention and Will, Simone Weil

Different cultures have different ways of understanding truth, each with its own biases. The Athenians had a great respect for first principles and the structure of rhetoric as a way of organizing evidence to arrive at truth. Our own culture tends to focus on extensively on numbers and data rather than feeling, experience, or rhetoric. (following N