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Thomas Merton and the Language of Life
"By listening closely to nature, we can hear an organized energy of
life, full of patterns and meaning, that speaks to us. According to
scholar Elizabeth Sewell, we experience our environment as alive and
speaking to us in a great variety of linguistic forms, such as an
alphabet, grammar, syntax, cipher, book, and secret language. This is
probably because language renders us conscious, envelops the world in
consciousness, and gives the world life within us. We think with the
objects of the world, and we give them a life within us. The language of
life asks for our ears and calls for our souls." More in this evocative
essay.
