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Oct 26, 2020

"Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop'd. I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell." --Walt Whitman

Thomas Merton and the Language of Life

"By listening closely to nature, we can hear an organized energy of life, full of patterns and meaning, that speaks to us. According to scholar Elizabeth Sewell, we experience our environment as alive and speaking to us in a great variety of linguistic forms, such as an alphabet, grammar, syntax, cipher, book, and secret language. This is probably because language renders us conscious, envelops the world in consciousness, and gives the world life within us. We think with the objects of the world, and we give them a life within us. The language of life asks for our ears and calls for our souls." More in this evocative essay.