holy

Quote for Today: Kevin Codd

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I hear a swelling swoosh; from the south a bullet train whizzes into view on the tracks, knifes through the landscape in a matter of moments, then disappears with a whoosh. It has just covered in a few seconds what has taken me hours to walk. That very fast train reminds me that, as a pilgrim, travel is made holy in its slowness. I see things that neither the passengers of the train nor the drivers of the automobiles see. I feel things that they will never feel. I have time to ponder, imagine, daydream. I tire. I thirst. In my slow walking, I find me.

― Kevin Codd, Beyond Even the Stars: A Compostela Pilgrim in France

Image: Mt. Fuji and Bullet Train © Roger W with CCLicense

 

Quote for Today: John Steinbeck

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Tollundmannen

“This here ol’ man jus’ lived a life an’ just died out of it. I don’ know whether he was good or bad, but that don’t matter much. He was alive, an’ that’s what matters. An’ now he’s dead, an’ that don’t matter. Heard a fella tell a poem one time, an’ he says All that lives is holy. Got to thinkin’, an’ purty soon it means more than the words says. An’ I wouldn’t pray for a ol’ fella that’s dead. He’s awright. He got a job to do, but it’s all laid out for im an’ there’s on’y one way to do it. But us, we got a job to do, an’ they’s a thousan’ ways, an’ we don’ know which one to take. An’ if I was to pray, it’d be for the folks that don’ know which way to turn. Grampa here, he got the easy straight. An’ now cover im up an let im get to his work.”

―Casy in The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
 Tollund Man, Public Domain Image

Quote for Today: Peter Matthiessen

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Stupas near the north face of Kailash, the sacred Crystal Mountain, Tibet © Yasunori Koide with GNU License

Stupas near the north face of Kailash, the sacred Crystal Mountain, Tibet
© Yasunori Koide with GNU License

I grow into these mountains like a moss. I am bewitched. The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air, the sound of earth and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds, the mythic beasts, the flags, great horns, and old carved stones, the silver ice in the black river, the Kang, the Crystal Mountain. Also, I love the common miracles-the murmur of my friends at evening, the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time… gradually my mind has cleared itself, and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a bell. Though we talk little here, I am never lonely; I am returned into myself. In another life-this isn’t what I know, but how I feel- these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon- the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the super Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again to the sky.

―Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard