Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else – above all, a travel bureau – arrange everything before-hand?
~ Richard Aldington, 1929
Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art.
~ Oscar Wilde
If you can’t change everything all at once, then at least work on changing something each day. Become aggressive in your battle with the ego. You probably don’t need all the things that it wants. You need hope, discipline, creative expression, love, and serenity—these are the important things. Remember, when you are balanced, one stepping stone will lead you to the next. But you will rarely see the whole journey or all the answers at once.
~Stuart Wilde
We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious — the people, events, and things of the day — to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
~ Annie Dillard, For the Time Being
Hey! It’s summer! Be free and happy and danceful and uninhibited and now-y!
~ Terri Guillemets
Every moment is precious, even the ones behind me that I often reflect upon with a reserved smile. However… I seldom look back, only forward in anticipation of the next greater now.
~ Carl Henegan, Darkness Left Undone
My new neighborhood was not just the countryside, which our society sees with dominating eyes and determines to change for its own good, but a land, or lands, of the universe, peopled by lives that came to the present out of unrecorded time. Out on the flats, and no less inshore, I could expose myself to currents of unfailing energy, while light and water kept flowing past, and feel a wealth of other senses moving with me. Every life was taking advantage of its time. In learning to recognize these members of a greater community, not only by their labels, as objects of natural history, but for their connections to myself, I started to make some progress. I pushed out the boundaries that had confined me, and it began to be an open world again.
~ John Hay from the essay The New World in The Way to the Salt Marsh: A John Hay Reader Continue reading “A bike ride at Blackwater”
breezes at dawn 