A Year With Thomas Merton - February 17

Absent from the Wedding Feast

Today was the prophetic day, the first of the real shining spring: not that there was not warm weather last week, not that there will not be cold weather again. But this was the day of the year when spring became truly credible.

The morning got more and more brilliant and I could feel the brilliancy of it getting into my own blood. Living so close to the cold, you feel the spring. And this is man's mission! The earth cannot feel all this. We must. But living away from the earth and the trees, we fail them. We are absent from the wedding feast.

There are moments of great loneliness and lostness in this solitude, but often then come other, deeper moments of hope and understanding, and I realize that these would not be possible in their purity, their simple, secret directions anywhere but in solitude. I hope to be worthy of them.

After dinner, when I came back to the hermitage, the whole hillside was so bright and new that I wanted to cry out, and I got tears in my eyes from it!

With the new comes also memory: as if that which was once so fresh in the past (days of discovery when I was nineteen or twenty) were very close again, and as if one were beginning to live again from the beginning. One must experience spring like that. A whole new chance! A complete renewal!

February 17, 1966, VI.18-19