The three months of solitude were of the greatest significance for me. I came away from them very much strengthened — ready to share my insights with people who were interested in hearing them. Still today, I have the sounds of the jungle in my ears: the cries of the monkeys and birds and the wind rushing through the banana leaves. But there were also times of utter silence, at dawn and twilight. I took walks in the jungle in order to look at nature as a part of myself.
Whether you know it or not, you were
born to have a rendezvous with destiny;
your journey toward it has already
begun. But my people make a distinction between destiny and fate. We don't think we are
born with a "fate" that impels us to act out some script composed by a higher hand, but
rather that each of us has a destiny, a preexisting pattern, which, in our hearts, we wish one
day to fulfill.