[Photo: “From Here to There,” by user “allaboutgeorge” on Flickr. (Used under a Creative Commons license.) The installation (called “HERETHERE” for obvious reasons) straddles the boundary between Berkeley and Oakland, California; some believe that it’s a sculptural joke based on Gertrude Stein’s “There is no there there” quip, which referred to Oakland. You can read about the original project proposal here.]
From whiskey river:
A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground.
(Rebecca Solnit [source])
…and:
I don’t mean it’s easy or assured, there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe—that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.
(Mary Oliver [source])
Not from whiskey river:
236
Some keep the Sabbath going to Church —
I keep it, staying at Home —
With a Bobolink for a Chorister —
And an Orchard, for a Dome —Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —
I, just wear my Wings —
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton — sings.God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —
I’m going, all along.
(Emily Dickinson [source])
…and:
The funny thing about stopping is that as soon as you do it, here you are. Things get simpler. In some ways, it’s as if you died and the world continued on. If you did die, all your responsibilities and obligations would immediately evaporate. Their residue would somehow get worked out without you. No one else can take over your unique agenda. It would die or peter out with you just as it has for everyone else who has ever died. So you don’t need to worry about it in any absolute way.
If this is true, maybe you don’t need to make one more phone call right now, even if you think you do. Maybe you don’t need to read something just now, or run one more errand. By taking a few moments to “die on purpose” to the rush of time while you are still living, you free yourself to have time for the present. By “dying” now in this way, you actually become more alive now.
(Jon Kabat-Zinn [source])
…and:
Letter from Swan’s Island
(excerpt)I have a fantasy: to walk on water.
Not eastward, the Atlantic far out
scares me, but long, island-hopping
giant steps up and down
the coast the way as a child
I’d make my “two-legged” compass
walk the map. Walking to school
a thousand winter mornings,
I imagined each thought, each step,
an exercise in good and evil;
or, after confession, I’d cup
my hands around my breath,
saved for an hour, knowing I’d sin
again, the scars on my soul
whitening like the scars on my hands
where I burnt them on the stove.
Swan’s Island. A world
existing side by side with yours,
where love struggles to perfect
itself, and finally perfect,
finds it has no object.
The waking dream’s intact—
the world continues not to change,
and staying the same, changes us.
(Elizabeth Spires [source])
…and:
Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.
Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.
You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.
There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.
(Bill Bryson [source])
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