The way you travel

Close is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done…close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up.

Our human essence lies not in arrival but in being almost there: we are creatures who are on the way, our journey a series of impending unanticipated arrivals.

Human beings do not find their essence through fulfilment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go.

David Whyte, “Close” in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

New and wholesome

Each time we go out, the world is open and free; it offers itself so graciously to our hearts, to create something new and wholesome from it each day. It is a travesty of possibility and freedom to think we have no choice, that things are the way they are and that the one street, the one right way is all that is allotted to us. Certainty is a subtle destroyer…

John O Donohue, Eternal Echoes

Rest

A bank Holiday here in Ireland.

What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?

Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 British Philosopher

Sunday Quote: Here

Happiness,
not in another place, but this place . . .
not for another hour, but this hour.

Walt Whitman

Not noticing

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain

in veils of inattention, apathy, fatique,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

Denise Levertov, Witness

The beauty in daily things

Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvelous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful! a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care for daily things.

Howard Nemerov, 1920 – 1991, Pulitzer Prize winning American Poet, Vermeer