journey

To be on journey is to love your life enough to change it, to choose struggle instead of exile, to risk everything with only the glimmering hope you are on the right path.

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.

Frequently we do not leave the past behind. We clasp on to it. We dissect it, and let fears for the future, tempered by the past, unconsciously prevent us from taking up the task eternal.

Our real journey in life is interior. It is a matter of growth, deepening, and an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts.

To journey without being changed is to be a nomad.
To change without journeying is to be a chameleon.
To journey and to be transformed by the journey
is to be a pilgrim.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

Loneliness is the feeling we have when we refuse to journey... Turning to invite the quiet transforms the feeling by changing the faces and quality of our attention. We are secure enough to let go, and to embrace solitude where we hear our own voice, even in the silence. We are wholeheartedly in the company of our deepest thoughts and feelings, independent of human presence or our physical surroundings.

The theory of karma suggests that life itself is in its essential nature both educational and healing, that the innate wholeness underlying the personality of each of us is being evoked, clarified, and strengthened through the challenges and experiences of our lifetime. All life paths may be a movement toward the soul.

I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.