Thought for a new year

We must assume our existence as broadly as we can; everything, even the unheard of, must be possible in it. That is at the bottom the only courage that is demanded of us; to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Saramago on a Sunday

Every man has his own patch of earth to cultivate. What’s important is that he dig deep.

José Saramago

That's the bank of the Tormes, in spring. I spent at least week fascinated with that larger than life daisy, standing tall. He just seemed to fit the quote, which fits the day, and the start of the Camino.

Happy Sunday.

Walking

"Walking", by Henry David Thoreau:

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, -- who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.

They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.

For this is the secret of successful sauntering.

When I offered to gather up (unrelated) favorites for a friend the other day, I found this Thoreau quote hiding as the long-ago tagged first favorite on my bookmark list.

Timely.

Seems I'm going for a walk.

Today is one of those days I will long remember. Today I spoke with one of my clients, the last client whose buy-in I wanted to secure. He immediately agreed to a busy September and a very quiet October.

I leave September 23 or 24 for a 5-week saunter along the Camino de Santiago. I hope to start with the Camino Aragonés and finish with a walk from Santiago to Finisterre.

As soon as this incredible stroke of perfect timing and delicious luck sinks in, I'll be back to blog about the getting-ready.

How's tomorrow for you?

I'm with Anatole

It's good to collect things, but it's better to go on walks.

-Anatole France












out for a walk, Prats de Mollo

The music of time

There is something, a type of memory, I don't quite know what, a background noise, a music, barely perceptible, perhaps, but it is as if in the darkest, most well hidden heart of a house everything that happened in the house has remained there, molded, shaped. As if the house harbored in a musical score the meter of the sobs and of the happy times. The adagio of a lament. The andante of a dream. Now and then the tamborilero of the joys and the laughter. And abruptly, the hard blow. And now and then the silences. Also the silences. You open the door and there it is, the full symphony, and suddenly you let yourself be carried from smell to smell, from sound to sound. From sensation to sensation. The music of time.

The quote is (translated by me) from a gorgeously lyrical book, Utilidades de las Casas, by Isabel Cobo. I loved it when I read it, and somehow my recent trips to little places - La Alberca, Prats de Mollo, Mogarraz - brought it to mind. Small towns have a similar kind of memory, don't they?

I knew I liked William James

Most people live...in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of
their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily
organism, should get into a habit of using only his little finger.

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901)

From Rolf Potts at Vagabonding

Change your world and the world changes

...here it is in all its blinking simplicity: Change Your World, and The World Changes. We are not powerless....

This is not the time to throw up our hands, nor to exhaust ourselves over-defining our problems. It is time to choose our lives. In so doing, we’ll have a rippling impact that will make all the difference.

Consider this:

If we are sick of foreign wars, make peace with our personal enemies.

If we are concerned with our nation’s debt, save our own money.

If we are sickened by materialism, buy only what we really value.

If we are concerned with global warming, conserve, walk, telecommute.

If we are worried about the environment, recycle, plant trees, grow something.

If we are angry with our leaders, propose and post real solutions.

If we are worried about health care costs, eat right, exercise, and sleep.

If we are worried about crime, drugs, and violence, participate in a neighborhood watch.

If we are sad about the decline of marriage, make ours the best example of commitment and fulfillment we can.

If we are worried about terrorists, put some boundaries between ourselves and those who use or abuse us.

I hope you can see what I’m trying to get at. .. These are simply reminders that for every big overwhelming problem in the world, there is a version of it in our lives. If we focus on what we can control, our own lives will bloom and our influence will spread.

from a recent blog post by Will Barre, founder of the American Dream Project
found at Motto

On work, inspiration, and not knowing...

"Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists. There is, there has been, there always will be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem that they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

"....That's why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include spaces within us as well as the outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended."

Excerpt from Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska's Nobel Lecture, 1996.

The Fourth World

There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own....They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex, or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean....They are exiles in their own communinities, because they are always a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it.


Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

The trouble with normal

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.

Bruce Coburn


Today my never ending search for the perfect work-at-home soundtrack took me deep enough into my CD collection to find myself happily singing out this Bruce Coburn line, one of my all time favorites. I smiled, never having been accused of being normal.

What EB said

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.

E.B.White US author & humorist (1899 - 1985)

Shamelessly swiped from cream, who made my day with it. If you've yet to discover the dynamic duo of cream and feedblitz, which will effortlessly deliver his posts to your inbox, you're missing lots of made days.

The most beautiful day

Photo: Iglesia de Santa María del Castillo, Madrigal de las Altas Torres


Found posted in the entrance to Saint Nicolas de Bari Church, in Madrigal de las Altas Torres, Ávila:

The most beautiful day: today
The greatest obstacle: fear
The easiest thing: to be wrong
The root of all evil: egoism
The most beautiful distraction: work
The worst defeat: discouragement
The first necessity: to communicate
What makes me the happiest: being useful to the rest of mankind
The most gratifying sensation: inner peace
The best cure: optimism
The strongest force in the world: faith
The most necessary people: parents
The most beautiful thing in the world: love

Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, 1999

Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.

Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist (1999)

Serendipitously stumbled across October 31, 2006 in a wild google for a Feynman link.

Jan Morris: Markers

Birth and death are the ultimate bookends, and between them a muddied narrative unfolds. In the course of it there crop up moments, experiences or places which in retrospect, rather like faces in an identification parade, we recognize as markers: the experience of first love, perhaps, a song or a book, the dread moment when we first needed spectacles, the impact of some particular corner of the world.

-- Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

A wise and timely thought?

There is divine beauty in learning, just as there is human beauty in tolerance.
To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth.
Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.
The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons,
mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples.
I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests.
And so are you.

Elie Wiesel

Strange and wonderful

Found at the bottom of the backpack I emptied in yesterday's cleaning frenzy:

A Gem sugar packet I picked up somewhere in Ireland, with the brand logo on one side and this delightful little thought on the other:

A spoonful of Irish: "An rud is annamh is iontach."

What is strange is wonderful.

I'm not sure this little sugar pack didn't just explain me to me!
What is strange is wonderful!

I think I am wishing all of us strange things today. In fact, I know I am!

Wine for the Soul

Laughter is wine for the soul - laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness. The hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living.

Sean O'Casey


I've named the handsome little guy above The Boy at the Next Table. We laughed our way through a meal at a restaurant in Barcelona.

Sailing, waiting, watching

As humans we live in the constant presumption of dominion. We believe that we own the world, that it belongs to us, that we have it under our firm control. But the sailor knows all too well the fallacy of this view. The sailor sits by his tiller waiting and watching. He knows he isn't sovereign of earth and sky any more than the fish in the sea or birds in the air. He responds to the subtle shiftings of the wind, the imperceptible ebbings of the tide. He changes course. He trims his sheets.

He sails.

Richard Bode, from First You Have to Row a Little Boat.


I cancelled a long booked ocean crossing (my first) to wander Ireland with my brother - a week or 10 or 12 days from the Azores to Faro. Maybe the Spanish have gotten to me; a week with a brother I seldom see, about to launch his own far-flung adventure halfway around the world from me, tempted me more than the act of marking "ocean passage" off my to-do list. And then there was the timing - the residency papeleo , the costs and the time away from my fledgling new projects. The tides had turned, it seemed...

Some days it doesn't feel easy, this living as a landlocked sailor. I miss the physicality of sailing, the full speed ahead quiet, the places I go when I'm on the water. As a writer I miss the illimitable metaphor of sailing, the adventure of every sail, the little something I inevitably bring home, learned.

So I was delighted to run across this favorite bit of Bode today, tucked in a old notebook...

A wise woman, well dressed

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting.

Katharine Hepburn











I spent my corporate life trying to dress like her. ("Power Hepburn", I called it.) I just stumbled across this piece of brilliant Kate today. I like it even better than all those man-cut trousers I gave up with the mahogany desk.

Longing and Wishing

It seems to me we can never give up longing and WISHING while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

George Eliot