Life Is The Principle Of Self-Renewal

“Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life — they have never felt its breath, its heart — however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material which needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be moulded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my theories about it.” BORIS PASTERNAK Doctor Zhivago

Embrace Life Like A Lover

“It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the love and courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace life like a lover.” Morris West The Shoes Of The Fisherman

St Francis

The saint I love the most is St Francis of Assisi. He’s strongly connected with several of the Spanish caminos. The prayer attributed to him is well known, and is beautiful. He described the wind and the rain as his brothers. He said that “all the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” And he also said, modestly and humbly, “I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, He can work through anyone.” After a serious illness and spiritual crisis in 1204, he embraced a life of poverty and non-materialism. He’s forever associated with a love for nature, for animals and flowers, and with a deep and humane compassion for the poor and the sick.

Things Are What We Make Them

“Time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of Thought. The Imagination can transcend them and move in a free sphere of ideal existence. Things, also, are in their essence what we choose to make them. A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it. ‘Where others,’ says Blake, ‘see but the Dawn coming over the hill, I see the sons of God shouting for joy.’”

Oscar Wilde De Profundis 

The Unknowable Soul Of Man

“In one sense of the word it is, of course, necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself. That is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable is the ultimate achievement of Wisdom. When one has weighed the sun in a balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”

Oscar Wilde De Profundis

A Transparent Summer Morning

“I believe in you, my soul …

Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat …

Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning …

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,

And that a kelson* of the creation is love …”

Walt Whitman Song Of Myself (Quoted by William James in The Varieties Of Religious Experience)

* “kelson’ or ‘keelson”: a longitudinal beam fastened to the keel of a vessel for strength and stiffness

The Friendly And Sympathetic Society Of Nature

“Once, a few weeks after I came to the woods, for an hour I doubted whether the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was somewhat unpleasant. But, in the midst of a gentle rain, while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once, like an atmosphere, sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine-needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.”

Thoreau Walden

Endless Roads

“As I can’t leap from cloud to cloud, I want to wander from road to road. That little path there by the clipped hedge goes up to the high road. I want to go up that path and to walk along the high road, and so on and on and on, and to know all kinds of people. Did you ever think that the roads are the only things that are endless; that one can walk on and on, and never be stopped by a gate or a wall? They are the serpent of eternity. I wonder they have never been worshipped. What are the stars beside them? They never meet one another. The roads are the only things that are infinite. They are all endless.”

From the play Where There Is Nothing by WB Yeats

 

What We Can Learn From Animals

I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained,

I stand and look at them long and long;

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Walt Whitman From Song Of Myself

Traveling At Home

Even in a country you know by heart
it’s hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going.

Wendell Berry

Thanks to Andy at Pilgrimpace for this.