seeds

"the more we make of ourselves, the less we actually exist."

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, for honor, knowledge, and love to clothe this false self and construct it's nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered it's surface.

Perhaps if I only realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire, I would really begin to live life after all.

-Thomas Merton "Seeds"



[current favs: merton, elisabeth elliot - "discipline", flickr sites, joshua radin]