Happy Birthday Thomas Merton!

Dear Diary,

Today is the 100th anniversary of Thomas Merton's birth.  I  stayed at the Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky in 2013 and was very privileged to meet Br. Paul Quenon who was a novice under Thomas Merton.  We share a love of contemplative photography and spent an hour talking about how he has photographed around the abbey for over 50 years.  He's never left the monastery grounds in all those years.  He finds all the inspiration he needs in that beautiful setting.

He is also a poet and he took me to Merton's hermitage, usually off limits to abbey guests and he read some of his wonderful poems there.  To be in Merton's sanctuary was a real gift indeed.  Merton is buried behind the church and it is a place of pilgrimage for many who love this gentle man's writings and photographs.  My copy of The Seven Story Mountain is one of my most cherished books as is his book of photography, The Geography of Holiness and his essays on Nature, When Trees Say Nothing.

So, Happy Birthday Thomas Merton!  You have been a wonderful inspiration for me and so many others!

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
- Thomas Merton

ps.  Merton loved to photograph in the Pleasant Hill Shaker Village and I stayed there after I left Gethsemani.   I had traveled 1,000 miles to see the staircase.  You can see the photographs I made of them in the folio Simplicity and Light.