“At the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were strangers.
It was like walking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness…if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained.
There is no way of telling people that they are walking around shining like the sun.”
– Thomas Merton, 1958
A Burd in Flight 