content to be lost

Desert and void. The uncreated is waste and emptiness to the creature. Not even sand. Not even stone. Not even darkness and night. A burning wilderness would at least be "something." It burns and is wild. But the Uncreated is no something. Waste. Emptiness. Total poverty of the Creator: yet from this poverty springs everything. The waste is inexhaustible. Infinite Zero. Everything wants to return to it and cannot. For who can return "nowhere?" But for each of us there is a point of nowhereness in the middle of movement, a point of nothingness in the midst of being: the incomparable point, not to be discovered by insight. If you seek it you do not find it. If you stop seeking, it is there. But you must not turn to it. Once you become aware of yourself as seeker, you are lost. But if you are content to be lost you will be found without knowing it, precisely because you are lost, for you are, at last, nowhere.

...

 The ALL is nothing, for if it were to be a single thing separated from all other things, it would not be ALL. This precisely is the liberty I have always sought: the freedom of being subject to nothing and therefore to live in All, through ALL, by Him who is ALL.  In Christian terms, this is to live "in Christ," for the Spirit is like the wind, blowing where He pleases, and He is the Spirit of Truth.  The "Truth shall make you free."

But if the truth is to make me free, I must also let go my hold upon myself, and not retain the semblance of a self which is an object of a "thing." I, too, must be no-thing. And when I'm no-thing I am in the ALL, and Christ lives in me.




~ Thomas Merton
from Merton's Palace of Nowhere by James Finley
sketch by the author

nowhere

They are to be admired those survivors

of solitude who have gone with no maps

into the room without features,

where no wilderness awaits a footstep trace,

no path of danger to a cold summit

to look back on and feel exuberant,

no clarity of territories yet untouched

that tremble near the human breath,

no thickets of undergrowth with deep pores

to nest the litanies of wind addicted birds,

no friendship of other explorers

drawn into the dream of the unknown.

No.  They do not belong to the outside worship

of the earth, but risk themselves in the interior

space where the senses have nothing to celebrate,

where the air intensifies the intrusion of the human

and a poultice of silence pulls every sound

out of circulation down into the ground,

where in the panic of being each breath unravels

an ever deeper strand in the web of weaving mind,

shawls of thought fall off, empty and lost,

where only the red scream of the blood continues unheard

without anonymous skin, and the end of all exploring

is the relentless arrival at an ever novel nowhere.

~ John O'Donohue

from Echoes of Memory

love many things

Vincent had been in love with and proposed to several women, all of whom rejected him. 

After so many failed relationships, Vincent eventually came to accept his fate.

"I believe that certainly it’s better to bring up children than to expend all one’s nervous energy in making paintings, but what can you do, I myself am now, at least I feel I am, too old to retrace my steps or to desire something else. This desire has left me, although the moral pain of it remains."

 

Perhaps as a consequence of his lack of lasting romantic involvements, an expanded idea of the concept of love developed which seems to be revealed to us in several of Vincent's letters to his brother Theo.

"Since the beginning of this love I have felt that unless I gave myself up to it entirely, without any restriction, with all my heart, there was no chance for me whatever, and even so my chance is slight. But what is it to me whether my chance is slight or great? I mean, must I consider this when I love? No, no reckoning; one loves because one loves. Then we keep our heads clear, and do not cloud our minds, nor do we hide our feelings, nor smother the fire and light, but simply say: Thank God, I love."

"Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is every deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, these open the prison by supreme power, by some magic force. Where sympathy is renewed, life is restored."

"Love a friend, love a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more."

"It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done!"

"The best way to know God is to love many things."



 ~ Vincent Van Gogh
with thanks to Brain Pickings and www.vangoghmuseum



 
Vincent at age 19

 

the inner ground

The way to find the real "world" is not merely to measure 

and observe what is outside us, but to discover our own inner ground.  

For that is where the world is, first of all: in my deepest self... 

This "ground," this "world" where I am mysteriously present 

at once to my own self and to freedoms of all other men,

 is not a visible, objective and determined structure 

with fixed laws and demands.  

It is a living and self-creating mystery 

of which I am myself a part, 

to which I am myself my own unique door.

~Thomas Merton

from Merton's Palace of Nowhere 
 by
James Finley

other nations

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.

 Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, 

man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge 

and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. 

 

We patronize them for their incompleteness, 

for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves.

 And therein we err, and greatly err. 

For the animal shall not be measured by man.

 In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, 

gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained,

 living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, 

they are not underlings; they are other nations, 

caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, 

fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

- Henry Beston
from The Outermost House