I just completed my first book of the year (yes I know, in two days) – a book well read penned by a man well travelled. Pico Iyer journeys across the world – Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Jerusalem, Ladakh, Japan, Iran, and Varanasi – and ponders on man’s elusive search for paradise. Is it what you see, or is it within? Or a combination of both?
Here are a few lines from the book, that I felt were very meaningful and worth meditating on…
“There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice”
Ulysses S. Grant
“By our love, the divine may be reached and held; by our thinking, never.”
Unknown
Poetry is the form that shimmers between fact and fiction, a world of suggestions that does not allow one to settle into certainties…
The judgements of God are seldom so ambiguous as those of the men who say they are speaking on behalf of God.
If the Age of Globalism could leave us ever more provincial, the Age of Information seemed to leave us knowing less about the rest of the world than ever before—and least of all about the places we heard most about.
Somehow it seemed easier than ever to sit in a darkened cave, backs turned to the world, hypnotized by images projected on the walls that keep reality at a distance.
Troubled places often look to writers in the hope that imagination can see beyond the divisions that ideologies enforce; the writer’s job, after all, is to dismantle the very notion of an Other by showing how your hurts belong to me, as my hopes do to you.
But the half known life is where so many of our possibilities lie. In the realm of worldly affairs it can be a tragedy that so many of us in our global neighborhood choose to see other places through screens, reducing fellow humans to two dimensions. On a deeper level, however, it’s everything half known, from love to faith to wonder and terror, that determines the course of our lives.
Once in a lifetime…hope and history rhyme.
Seamus Heaney
Some are thoughtful on their way,
Some are doubtful, so they pray.
I hear the hidden voice that may
Shout, “Both paths lead astray.
Omar Khayyam
The secrets eternal neither you know nor I,
And answers to the riddle neither you know nor I,
Behind the veil there is much talk about us, why
When the veil falls, neither you remain nor I.
Unknown
The only faith I can trust will be the one that comes to me not as an answer but as a probably unanswerable question.
Thomas Merton
to be continued…