April 10, 2009
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Spring Fever
I am ready to leave again. warm weather makes me restless.
“Leaving home is a kind of forgiveness, and when you get among strangers, you’re amazed at how decent they seem. Nobody smirks at you or gossips about you, nobody resents your successes or relishes your defeats. You get to start over, a sort of redemption.” –Garrison Keillor “Leaving Home”
“We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them…how should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.” Rainer Maria Rilke “letters to a young poet”
“Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am…stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.” Micheal Crichton “Travels”
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, In our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” Pico Iyer “Why we travel”
“People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.” Joseph Campbell “the power of myth”
“It is not speech which we should want to know; we should want to know the speaker. It is not things seen which we should want to know; we should know the seer. It is not sounds which we should want to know; we should know the hearer. It is not the mind which we should want to know: we should know the thinker.” –From the Kaushitaki Upanishad
“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time –T.S.Eliot
“Allons! The road is before us!
It is safe-I have tried it-my own feet have tried it well—be not detain’d!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! Let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! Mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! Let the lawyer plea in the court, and the judge expound the law.
Comerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?”
–Walt Whitman “song of the open road”
* i got my permit to backpack down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. in two months.
