Officially Walktober

Little hand, small flowers from the meadow.

[Walking] is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things.  It is the one way of freedom.  If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside.

~ Elizabeth von Arnim, The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

~ Barbara Brown Taylor

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A Monday meander: How I spent my summer vacation

An early morning walk.

The purpose of a vacation is to have the time to rest.  But many of us, even when we go on vacation, don’t know how to rest.  We may even come back more tired than before we left.

~ Thich Nhat Hahn

A vacation frequently means that the family goes away for a rest, accompanied by a mother who sees that the others get it.

~ Marcelene Cox

How about a Wednesday Wander?

June moon. (June’s full moon is known as a Strawberry Moon but ours looked more like a Peach Moon in the indigo sky.)

Deep trust in life is not a feeling but a stance that you deliberately take.  It is the attitude we call courage.

~ Br. David Steindl-Rast

Our experiences of embodiment may not always correspond with idealized images of holiness, but these preconceptions derive from masculine standards of perfection. Such paradigms have caused great harm, and they are no longer valid. I invite you to abandon your efforts to fix yourself and instead reclaim your innate beauty and worth as a luminous cell in the body of Mother Earth.

~ Mirabai Starr

What’s new?

Beautiful lilies from a beautiful friend.

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

~ Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation

It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

A meander: This and that and maybe another thing

Two snow geese.

Peace is not won by those who fiercely guard their differences, but by those who with open minds and hearts seek out connections.

~ Katherine Paterson

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

~ Herman Melville

We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.

~ William James

A Monday meander: Janes Island

Crown shyness.

But we shouldn’t be concerned about trees purely for material reasons, we should also care about them because of the little puzzles and wonders they present us with. Under the canopy of the trees, daily dramas and moving love stories are played out. Here is the last remaining piece of Nature, right on our doorstep, where adventures are to be experienced and secrets discovered. And who knows, perhaps one day the language of trees will eventually be deciphered, giving us the raw material for further amazing stories. Until then, when you take your next walk in the forest, give free rein to your imagination-in many cases, what you imagine is not so far removed from reality, after all!

~ Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees

Walktober 2018

Flipping the reflection. (Reflections on the pond at Pocomoke River State Park.)

The walks are the unobtrusive connecting thread of other memories, and yet each walk is a little drama in itself, with a definite plot with episodes and catastrophes … and it is naturally interwoven with all the thoughts, the friendships, and the interests that form the staple of ordinary life.

~ Leslie Stephen