Silence is my music now.

One of the things he liked most about the hermitage was the silence. “Silence is my music now.” He could pick up the small sounds of insects and animals. Sometimes when the wind was strong, it blew the sound of the traffic to him. He liked to think of all the people going on with their lives and to think of himself as in a sense staying where he was for their sakes, “like a lighthouse keeper.”
- Phyllis Rose, “The Music of Silence”, Atlantic Monthly, writing about Thomas Merton.

. . .

April 15, 1965. Holy Thursday
…

The rain is slowing down now (7:15). The valley is dark and beautifully wet and you can almost see the grass growing and the leaves pushing out of the poplars. There are small flowers on my redbuds and the dogwood buds are beginning to swell.

            There is no question for me that my one job as monk is to live the hermit life in simple direct contact with nature, primitively, quietly, doing some writing, maintaining such contacts as are willed by God, and bearing witness to the value and goodness of simple things and ways, and loving God in it all. I am more convinced of this than of anything contingent on my life and I am sure it is what He asks of me. Yet I do not always respond with simplicity. 
- Thomas Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life: Seeking Peace in the Hermitage. The Journals of Thomas Merton: Volume Five 1963-1965.  Merton's journals return again and again to this tension — the life one knows is right, and the difficulty of living it.

. . .

Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk, wrote about thirty books I think. In addition to his journals, which I turn to when I need to read about the difficulty accomplishing what should be easy, namely inner peace (inner peace should be easy because it is mostly about not doing, about letting the mud settle), two pieces of his writing have had a profound effect on me. I’ve often quoted from them in Heron Dance. 

One, The Rain and the Rhinoceros, is a meditation on rain at night in the woods.

The other, from the autobiographical novel My Argument With the Gestapo suggests we explore a difficult question: "Ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person. The better answer he has, the more of a person he is. . .”

I’ve posted both, along with other favorite Merton quotes and excerpts here.