You have been walking the water’s edge, holding up your robes to keep them dry.
You must dive naked under, deeper, under a thousand times deeper.
Love flows down.
Rumi
I am a believer in pilgrimage in a mediaeval sense. It functions to ground us in some way. We have unsettled souls; we are human beings, bound for mortality, wondering about eternity. There is a consolation in doing something that is a ritual – there have been many before us, many will come after us and we are part of something greater than ourselves, if only for a moment.
Liam Ó Muirthile, 1950 – 2018, Irish-language poet
Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.
The world is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.
Wendell Berry
We have often heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is usually taken to mean that the sense of beauty is utterly subjective; there is no accounting for taste because each person’s taste is different. The statement has another, more subtle meaning: if our style of looking becomes beautiful, then beauty will become visible and shine forth for us. We will be surprised to discover beauty in unexpected places where the ungraceful eye would never linger. The graced eye can glimpse beauty anywhere, for beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments or instances; it does not wait for perfection but is present already secretly in everything. When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary.
John O Donohue, Beauty: Rediscovering The True Sources of Compassion, Serenity, and Hope