I am with silence this morning, in need of it.
This was a rare morning. I allowed myself to stay in bed, to stay with my dreams, which seemed important and profound for me.
They were about movement and creativity. I feel my inner being reformed.
That allows me to appreciate even more these words of Thomas Merton.
Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement seems to ignore the tranquility of nature by pretending to have a purpose. The loud plane seems for a moment to deny the reality of the clouds and of the sky, by its direction, its noise, and its pretended strength. The silence of the sky remains when the plane has gone. The tranquility of the clouds will remain when the plane has fallen apart. It is the silence of the world that is real. Our noise, our business, our purposes, and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business, and our noise: these are the illusion.
Thomas Merton. No Man Is An Island (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955: 257.
Thought for the Day
It is not speaking that breaks our silence, but the anxiety to be heard. The words of the proud man impose silence on all others, so that he alone may be heard. The humble man speaks only in order to be spoken to. The humble man asks nothing but an alms, then waits and listens.
Thomas Merton. Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1958): 91.