One of the lovely aspects of life on Skye is the accessibility of the natural beauty that surrounds us. I have already admitted that winter is not my preferred season, lacking life, colour, light, vibrancy and the flourishing of all plant life. Having said that there are times, even in the shortest days of winter that fill me with awe at the beauty of the natural world.
Part of the contemplative life, it seems, is to be thoroughly in love with the creator’s unfolding and ever-changing artistry. This is an excerpt from Thomas Merton’s ‘Turning Toward the World’
May 21, 1963
Marvelous vision of the hills at 7:45 am. The same hills as always, as in the afternoon, but now catching the light in a totally new way, at once very earthly and very ethereal, with delicate cups of shadow and dark ripples and crinkles where I had never seen them, and the whole slightly veiled in mist so that it seemed to be a tropical shore, a newly discovered continent. A voice in me seemed to be crying, “Look! Look!” For these are the discoveries, and it is for this that I am high on the mast of my ship (have always been) and I know that we are on the right course, for all around is the sea of paradise.”
The following picture is not Thomas Merton’s but was taken by a friend of my husband a few days ago. However, perhaps it was a day not unlike it that Merton was writing of for it does seem to have elements of an ethereal new continent about it.
Some people might get the idea that contemplatives hide away in cloisters but contemplation is just as much rooted in action as it is non-action. In fact it’s an invitation to become deeply engaged with the world, but the world as it is, at its most real, in radical acceptance of reality as it is unfolding in our lives. Action and contemplation. As mystic Richard Rohr says it’s the AND that’s the important word there. You can’t have one without the other. There is probably no adequate psychology of contemplation but what we can say is that you need an integration of both because they are inseparable. Action feeds on contemplation in a good way, and vice versa. You can have a soul life and that is moving towards concrete, active caring for the world. So the question is how do we act in a heartfelt in depth loving truthful way and how do we contemplate without standing or sitting in isolation from the world, but as part of the whole?
I’d like to finish today’s musing with this quote from ‘New Seeds of Contemplation’ Thomas Merton.
“Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. it is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is a vivid realisation of the fact that that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is above all, awareness of the reality of that source. It knows the Source obscurely, but with a certainty that goes beyond reason and simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire, by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete. Yet contemplation is not vision because it sees ‘without seeing’ and knows ‘without’ knowing’ It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words, or even clear concepts. It can be suggested by words, by symbols, but in the very moment of trying to indicate what it knows, the contemplative mind takes back what it has said and denies what it has confirmed. For in contemplation we know by “unknowing” or better, we know beyond all knowing or “unknowing”. “
Integral Wisdom Activist 
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