A Year With Thomas Merton - March 13

All Day the Frogs Sing

As soon as I get into a cell by myself I am a different person! Prayer becomes what it ought to be. Everything is very quiet. The door is closed but I have the window open. It is warm--grey clouds fly all night--and all day the frogs sing.

Now it is evening. The frogs still sing. After the showers of rain around dinnertime, the sky cleared. All afternoon I sat on the bed rediscovering God, rediscovering myself, and the office and Scripture and everything.

It has been one of the most wonderful days I have ever known in my life, and yet I am not attached to that part of it either. My pleasure or the contentment that I may have experienced out of silence and solitude and freedom from all care does not matter. But I know that is the way I ought to be living: with my mind and senses silent, contacts with the world of business and war and community troubles severed--not solicitous for anything high or low or far or near--not pushing myself around with my own fancies or desires or projects--and not letting myself get hurried off my feet by the excessive current of activity that flows through Gethsemani with full force.

March 19, 1948, II.185