A chilly Saturday in spring

Rooted on the dunes. (Cape Henlopen, Delaware.)

We have little needs and we have deeper needs.

We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs til we have almost lost our deeper needs in a kind of madness. Let us prepare now for the death of our present little life and the re-emergence in a bigger life in touch with the moving cosmos. It is a question practically of relationship. We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relationship to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual and re-awakening. We must once more practice the rituals of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath and the last. To these rituals we must return or we must evolve them to suit our needs. For the truth is we are perishing for the lack of fulfillment of our greater needs. We are cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal, sources which flow eternally in the universe.

Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.

~ D. H. Lawrence

Walktober 2020

A little earthiness.  (This is one of the biggest mushrooms I’ve ever seen around here.  I though it was fake at first.  There were several more scattered throughout the woods.)

SOLVITUR AMBULANDO.

This ancient Latin phrase loosely translates as “It is solved by walking.”  A walk is a journey that requires very little — neither planning nor passport, neither ticket nor equipment.  Nearly always at our disposal, a walk provides so much more than just a change of scenery.  Walking has helped me decide what is wise and what is foolhardy, has made me fall in love with a place, has batted away my melancholy.  Walking has helped me loosen the grip technology has on my life, giving me space and permission to disconnect from my devices that beg for my attention and feed my anxiety.  Most of all, walking has nurtured my creativity as I struggle to give tangible form to abstract ideas.

~ Bonnie Smith Whitehouse, in the introduction to Afoot and Lighthearted: A Journal for Mindful Walking

A Saturday saunter

A small bit of sunshine.

There is an art to wandering.  If I have a destination, a plan – an objective – I’ve lost the ability to find serendipity.  I’ve become too focused, too single-minded.  I am on a quest, not a ramble.  I search for the Holy Grail of particularity, and miss the chalice freely offered, filled full to overflowing.

~ Cathy Johnson, On Becoming Lost

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 à 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. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walking

A Friday meander: Disc golf

First basket.

The tree giveth, the tree taketh away.

Throw long and prosper.

~ Disc Golf jokes/sayings found on Pinterest

Make the wind your friend.

~ Jimmy Lane, disc golf player (found on a disc golf discussion board)

10,000 reasons to be happy

First time out.

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened.  Happiness never decreases by being shared.

~ Buddha