A Year With Thomas Merton - April 3

A Time of Wordless Deepening

Yesterday, on orders from Brother Clement and Reverend Father, I marked the trees Andy Boone is to cut, down in the hollow behind the hermitage, where the spring is. What a tangle of brush, saplings, vines, fallen trees, honeysuckle, etc.! Marks of deer everywhere. A fire in there would be awful. I hope we can get a space of an acre or so good and clear between here and the spring, and keep it clear. And I can use the spring, for I need it. All this is the geographical unconscious of my hermitage. Out in front, the "conscious mind," the ordered fields, the wide valley, tame woods. Behind, the "unconscious"--this lush tangle of life and death, full of danger, yet where beautiful things move, the deer, and where there is a spring of sweet, pure water--buried!

Light rain all night. The need to keep working at meditation--going to the root. Mere passivity won't do at this point. But activism won't do either. A time of wordless deepening, to grasp the inner reality of my nothingness in Him Who Is. Talking about it in these terms seems absurd. Seems to have nothing to do with the concrete reality that is to be grasped. My prayer is peace and struggle in silence, to be aware and true, beyond myself, and to go outside the door of myself, not because I will it, but because I am called and must respond.

April 3 and 4, 1965, V.224