I never get lost because I don’t know where I’m going.
While armchair travelers dream of going places, traveling armchairs dream of staying put.
Sakyamuni once cried out in pity for a yogi by the river who had wasted twenty years of his human existence in learning how to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin.
It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals . . . with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being, alone.
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand. . . . Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.
A part, a large part, of traveling is an engagement of the ego vs. the world. . . . The world is hydra-headed, as old as the rocks and as changing as the sea, enmeshed inextricably in its ways. The ego wants to arrive at places safely and on time.
I have been a stranger in a strange land.
Jesus is not a blue-eyed right-winger. Jesus is the one who entered the world among the dispossessed and the outcasts to announce an entirely new way of thinking and living. The way of Jesus and the prophets . . . moves us beyond the familiar options of abandoning the poor, controlling the poor, or even “helping” the poor from places of isolation and comfort. Instead, it leads us to a new relationship with one another, a deep reconnection, a restoration of the shattered covenant.
The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what’s there. All of it.
We are infinitely more complicated than our ideas about ourselves.
I wonder whether you realize a deep, great fact. That souls, all human souls, are interconnected . . . that we can not only pray for each other but suffer for each other. Nothing is more real than this interconnection — this precious power put by God into the very heart of our infirmities.
In orbiting the sun, the earth departs from a straight line by one-ninth of an inch every eighteen miles — a very straight line in human terms. If the orbit changed by one-tenth of an inch every eighteen miles, our orbit would be vastly larger and we would all freeze to death. One-eighth of an inch? We would all be incinerated.
We keep our distance. It is all we have.
Whenever I prepare for a journey, I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order. This is what life has taught me.
Journeys end in lovers meeting.
For the wonderful thing about saints is that they were human. They lost their tempers, got hungry, scolded God, were egotistical or testy or impatient in their turns, made mistakes and regretted them. Still they went on doggedly blundering toward heaven.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
