Neděle
Učit se tančit vesmírný tanec - to je důvod, proč jsme tady na zemi a žijeme život, který žijeme. Alespoň takto lze vyjádřit přesvědčení srdce o potřebě rozpoznat božství, které se projevuje v prvotních rytmech každodenního života, který žijeme, a pohybovat se s ním.
-James Finley 

Pondělí
Většiny věcí, kterých si všímáme, si všimneme jen tak mimochodem, na cestě za něčím jiným; pak nám čas od času něco dá důvod k zastavení. Něco nás zaujme nebo upoutá naši pozornost a my jsme na chvíli přitahováni k zamyšlení nebo reflexi toho, co nás takto probudilo.
-James Finley  

Úterý
Bdění nevychází z vůle, ale z upřímného odevzdání se okamžiku - takovému, jaký je. Dokážeme-li být přítomni, zažijeme to, co většina z nás myslí pod pojmem Bůh, a ani to nemusíme nazývat Bohem. Jde z velké části o to, abychom se vzdali odporu vůči tomu, co nám okamžik nabízí, nebo abychom přestali lpět na minulém okamžiku.
-Richard Rohr 

Sunday
Learning to dance the cosmic dance—this is why we are here on this earth, living the life we are living. At least this is one way of expressing the heart’s conviction concerning the need to recognize and move with the divinity manifested in the primordial rhythms of the day by day life we are living.
—James Finley 

Monday
Most of the things that we notice, we notice in passing, on our way to something else; then, every so often, something gives us reason to pause. Something catches our eye or draws our attention, and we’re drawn for a moment to ponder or to reflect on that which awakened us in this way.
—James Finley  

Tuesday
Staying awake comes not from willpower but from a wholehearted surrender to the moment—as it is. If we can be present, we will experience what most of us mean by God, and we do not even need to call it God. It’s largely a matter of letting go of resistance to what the moment offers or to quit clinging to a past moment.
—Richard Rohr 

Wednesday 
You sit down to meditate not only because it helps you to find rest in the arms of the formless Beloved but also because it increases your chances of being stunned by beauty when you get back up. 
—Mirabai Starr 

Thursday 
A contemplative practice is any act, habitually entered into with your whole heart, as a way of awakening, deepening, and sustaining a contemplative experience of the inherent holiness of the present moment.
—James Finley 

Friday
Each time we give ourselves over to our contemplative practices, whatever they might be, we find ourselves, once again, one with the communal mystery in which there is no separate self.
—James Finley 

Seeing Not Looking  

Author Esther de Waal considers Thomas Merton’s practice of contemplative photography:   

Thomas Merton was of course a writer and a teacher, and a poet, but he was also a photographer, and it is from his photographs that we learn much about how he saw the world, and how he prayed—and the two are of course intimately connected…. He handled a camera as an artist would, and used it as an instrument of delight and perception. It was in the later 1950s that the journalist John Howard Griffin [1920–1980] visited Merton in his hermitage. He had his camera with him and … let [Merton] keep it on extended loan. At first when Merton sent him the negatives, John Howard Griffin was puzzled, for [Merton’s] view was so different from that of most people. Merton photographed whatever crossed his path—a battered fence, a rundown wooden shack, weeds growing between cracks, working gloves thrown down on a stool, a dead root, a broken stone wall. He approached each thing with attention, he never imposed, he allowed each thing to communicate itself to him in its own terms, and he gave it its own voice.  

Later on when he was out in the woods with a young friend, Ron Seitz, both with their cameras, Merton reprimanded him severely for the speed with which he approached things. He told him to stop looking and to begin seeing:  

Because looking means that you already have something in mind for your eye to find; you’ve set out in search of your desired object and have closed off everything else presenting itself along the way. But seeing is being open and receptive to what comes to the eye…. [1] 

He used his camera primarily as a contemplative instrument. He captured the play of light and dark, the ambience, the inner life. But above all he struggled towards an expression of silence through the visual image, so that his photographs show us that ultimately his concern was to communicate the essence of silence.