Welcome! I am a contemplative thinker and photographer from Colorado. In this blog, you'll discover photographs that I've taken on my hiking and backpacking trips, mostly in the American West. I've paired these with my favorite inspirational and philosophical quotes - literary passages that emphasize the innate spirituality of the natural world. I hope you enjoy them!

If you'd like to purchase photo-quote greeting cards, please go to www.NaturePhoto-QuoteCards.com .


In the Spirit of Wildness,

Stephen Hatch
Fort Collins, Colorado

P.S. There's a label index at the bottom of the blog.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

To Know God is Actually to Know Ourselves Penetrated with His Knowledge of Us


"To think of God is not to find Him as an object of our minds, but to find ourselves in Him, a perception of our being perceived.  The task is not to know the unknown but to be penetrated by it; not to know but to be known to Him, to expose ourselves to Him rather than Him to us."

Rabbi Abraham Heschel

"We know God insofar as we become aware of ourselves as known through and through by him. We 'possess' him in proportion as we realize ourselves to be possessed by him in the inmost depths of our being.  The aim of meditation is not to arrive at an objective and apparently 'scientific' knowledge about God, but to come to know him through the realization that our very being is penetrated with his knowledge and love for us."

Thomas Merton

Photo: Nokhu Crags in last light, Never Summer Range, January 6, 2012

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