“With my hair almost on end and the eyes of the soul wide open I am present, without knowing it at all, in this unspeakable Paradise, and I behold this secret, this wide open secret which is there for everyone, free, and no one pays any attention.”
THOMAS MERTON
Paying attention to the way the light falls on a tangle of vines or the sound of two rivers meeting, or even the pace of my own thoughts as I wander down an unfamiliar trail has helped me better recognize the wide open secret that Merton described in “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.” The images here were taken on an island in the Tuckasegee River in North Carolina on a day where the secret struggled to stay unnoticed.
