Simple and holy.

Something so ordinary but I was enchanted. It was a cold but bright sunny winter day on Long Island.It was noon and I was on the second floor looking out at the line of trees that separated our house from the next.They were evergreens and laden with a thick coating of snow.On one branch, spread out as if on a white brocade couch, was a grey squirrel, sound asleep in his after lunch nap.That sight made me so happy, he and I cherishing our restful naps.His solitude and peace.And mine.

This reminds me of a Merton quote that I had to put in my journal: "It set the seal on all the silences in which I had found Him, without seeming to find anything and I knew that I had every time come home with something tremendous, although my hands were always empty." He is talking about his trips to the woods and what he found there. It is my belief that since I have allowed God into my life, if He is a big part of my waking thoughts, then I will find Him everywhere.

 In 2003 I wrote: "In praise of that day when I wandered near the Flint River through the dry stiff leaves to an open spot in the woods.There, dropping low over the water was a dead tree, bent flat with it's bark long gone.The smooth wood presented itself and I sat down.

The sun slanted through the bare trees enough to warm and I settled, listening to the ripples swirling around the tree branches.The barred owls calling back and forth , the small downy pecking nearby. All the sounds that I need to hear to calm my mind and hear what the river , the trees have to say. The white sun seemed like a candle on a high shelf of a church as it flickered through the tree limbs."

I will never forget that day of peace and Presence.

Nor the day of strolling among the trees struggling with an a issue, to find a heart shaped lichen  on a smooth barked tree.Or the amazement of seeing fat lumbering turkeys take off and fly over the river to the other side, their footprints in the snow, splayed and huge.Or the heron that floated above my log soundless in its flight.

Near the end of his life Merton was besieged by people wanting to talk to him, disturb him in his hermitage in Kentucky. I know the feeling. So,Thomas, no longer here, I bow down in gratitude that you wrote what I feel. You were anti-war and then I didn't get it. I do now. Each day you started your writing anchored by words about place, the trees, birds, sounds, all holy. I see the same thing and I am humbled. Thank you.