I can't sleep. Which is nothing new.
And so, I'm following the advice my mother has given since I was 6 years old with this same problem.
"Read a book," she'd say, "maybe it will quiet your mind."
There are times when it proves to be a workable solution. And others when it simply turns up literary gems, tucked away in pages on my bookshelf, having been left too long unvisited.
Tonight, I savour these, and say goodnight to the world.
“We must begin by frankly admitting that the first place in which to go looking for the world is not outside us but in ourselves. We are the world. In the deepest ground of our being we remain in metaphysical contact with the whole of that creation in which we are only small parts. Through our senses and our minds, our loves, needs, and desires, we are implicated, without possibility of evasion, in this world of matter and of men, of things and of persons, which not only affect us and change our lives but are also affected and changed by us…The question, then, is not to speculate about how we are to contact the world – as if we were somehow in outer space – but how to validate our relationship, give it a fully honest and human significance, and make it truly productive and worthwhile for our world.“
Thomas Merton
And so, I'm following the advice my mother has given since I was 6 years old with this same problem.
"Read a book," she'd say, "maybe it will quiet your mind."
There are times when it proves to be a workable solution. And others when it simply turns up literary gems, tucked away in pages on my bookshelf, having been left too long unvisited.
Tonight, I savour these, and say goodnight to the world.
“We must begin by frankly admitting that the first place in which to go looking for the world is not outside us but in ourselves. We are the world. In the deepest ground of our being we remain in metaphysical contact with the whole of that creation in which we are only small parts. Through our senses and our minds, our loves, needs, and desires, we are implicated, without possibility of evasion, in this world of matter and of men, of things and of persons, which not only affect us and change our lives but are also affected and changed by us…The question, then, is not to speculate about how we are to contact the world – as if we were somehow in outer space – but how to validate our relationship, give it a fully honest and human significance, and make it truly productive and worthwhile for our world.“
Thomas Merton