Thomas Merton

However, the truest solitude is not something outside you, not an absence of people or of sound around you.

It is an abyss, opening up in the center of your own soul.

And this abyss of interior solitude is a hunger that will never be satisfied with any created thing.

The only way to find solitude is by hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty.

and desire and the person who has found solitude is empty as if they had been emptied by death

They have advanced beyond all horizons.

There are no directions left in which they can travel.

This is a country whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

You do not find it by traveling, but by standing still.

Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.

It is here that you discover, act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision

in obscurity and beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

Although it is true that this solitude is everywhere, there is a mechanism for finding it that has some reference to actual space, to geography and to physical isolation from the towns and the cities of people.

There should be at least a room or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you.

You should be able to untether yourself from the world and set yourself free.

losing all the fine strings and strands of tension that bind you by sight, by sound, by thought to the presence of other people.

But thou, when thou shalt pray, enter into thy chamber, and having shut the door, pray to thy Father

Once you have found such a place,

Be content with it.

And do not be disturbed if a good reason takes you out of it.