rocks & porches

Keep your eyes clean and your ears quiet and and your mind serene. Breathe God's air. Work, if you can, under His sky. But if you have to work in a city and live among machines and ride in the subways and eat in a place where the radio makes you deaf with spurious news and where the food destroys your life and the sentiments of those around you poison your heart with boredom, do not be impatient, but accept it as the love of God and as a seed of solitude planted in your soul. If you are appalled by those things, you will keep your appetite for the healing silence of recollection. But meanwhile - keep your sense of compassion for the men who have forgotten the very concept of solitude. You, at least, know that it exists, and that it is the source of peace and joy. You can still hope for such joy. They do not even hope for it anymore.

- Thomas Merton

I came across this passage this morning, while I was out on the front porch having some coffee and enjoying the rain and the quiet. Last weekend, we spent time camping with great friends in the beautiful spot pictured above. At some point, I found myself sitting on a rock out in the stream...doing some reading and thinking. The sound of the water running was loud, but gentle in it's steadiness and persistence. The sounds of the kids playing settled into the background, and I was just there...surrounded by life and sound and movement.

But it wasn't the movement of people rushing past to make a buck...or speeding to get one car-length in front of you at a light that's red anyway. It wasn't the sounds of a stereo thumping in some car that's taking a corner too fast. And it wasn't the life that we see when we look through the office window at some guy who's happiness depends on him crunching numbers or shuffling papers, endlessly, for an empire of greed and apathy.

The noise is a pure one...a sound that settles around you like a rhythm. The life here is ancient and teeming and completely interconnected by a Master Creator who's ingenuity and artistry boggles the mind.

It's not here to earn anything or necessarily accomplish anything.

It's here because it just is. Because it has to be.

And it's peaceful and joyful and fully alive.