"An Old Celtic Blessing"

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind always be at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face,

and rains fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again,

May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

"...The consistent care necessary ...."

 … The consistent care necessary to keep the body machinery functioning in spite of age and deterioration is mandatory.  A lifetime of training is required.  It’s so easy to blame the terrain, so to speak, or the light and wind for our failures and backsliding. But where the body is concerned there is not time for self-pity…. living as we do in society that wants to put old people to bed.  You can hardly get wisdom out of someone who is lying around during his last years.  Actuality is needed right up to the end….It’s a matter of testing your capacities and preparing for the next level.  Old age demands that we garner and lean on all previous experience.

from “A Walk on the Beach”, Joan Anderson

"Though the road is endless ...."

Though the road is endless, take the first step;

watching from a distance is not for real men.

To live for the body is all animals can do,

But you must travel by the life of the heart.

(Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi: Quatrain 288)

"It was very still ...."

It was very still, with the silence which we have driven from our world.

W Thesiger

"There is pleasure in the pathless woods ...."

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

Lord Byron