#wisdom traditions

“In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities and there is no joy in things that do not exist.”

—Thomas Merton, with thanks to louie, louie. Photo found at OSV Newsweekly.

“May the Great Mystery make sunrise in your heart." —Sioux Indian, spoken to william Tomkins, author of Universal Amercan Indian Sign Language, San Diego, 1926.

Art Credit: George Inness, "The Sun,” 1886

parabola-magazine:

“Vocation to Solitude — To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls up on that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars… to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into the bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of life into a living and vigilant silence.”

—Thomas Merton from Thoughts In Solitude (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956).

Pictured: Odilon Redon, Silence, 1900, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, NY, US