Seven Story Mountain

It's a seven-story mountain.
It's a long, long life ahead.
Got to find a voice and fill my throat again.
~Railroad Earth

For Music Monday, "Seven Story Mountain" by Railroad Earth.



Seven Story Mountain is the title of the 1948 autobiography of American Trappist monk and priest Thomas Merton, who named his autobiography after the mountain of purgatory from Dante's Purgatorio.

William Blake,
The Ascent of the Mountain of Purgatory

A quote from The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton:

Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.

Thomas Merton again, from a letter to Dorothy Day:

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.