When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature

by Thomas Merton

We kill everything around us even when we think we love and respect nature and life. This sudden power to deal death all around us simply by the way we live, and in total “innocence” and ignorance, is by far the most disturbing symptom of our time.

Beauty of the sunlight falling on a tall vase of red and white carnations and green leaves on the altar in the novitiate chapel. The light and shade of the red, especially the darkness in the fresh crinkled flower and the light warm red around the darkness, the same color as blood but not “red as blood,” utterly unlike blood. Red as a carnation. This flower, this light, this moment, this silence = Dominus est [the Lord is here], eternity! Best because the flower is itself and the light is itself and the silence is itself and I am myself—all, perhaps, an illusion but no matter, for illusion is nevertheless shadow of reality and reality is the grace that under lays these lights, these colors, and this silence.

it is when I am with people that I am lonely and when I am alone I am no longer lonely because then I have God and converse with Him (without words) without distraction or interference.

Why do I live alone? I don't know.…In some mysterious way I am condemned to it.…I cannot have enough of the hours of silence when nothing happens. When the clouds go by. When the trees say nothing. When the birds sing. I am completely addicted to the realization that just being there is enough, and to add something else is to mess it all up.

It is life, this thing in the woods. I do not claim it is real. All I say is that it is the life that has chosen itself for me.