The world can reach out for you, without thought or plan and, in reaching, reach into your depths. If you have ever sat quietly listening to the sound of the rain, you might have had the experience that after a while you can’t tell what is rain and what is you. It can be an intimate sound, as if the rain were falling through your chest. Sometimes i

heightened spiritual awareness is the natural result of your choice to put the material world in its place and hit the road for an extended time. Where your treasure is, your heart will be also—and your decision to enrich your life with time and experience (instead of more “things”) will invariably pay spiritual dividends. Travel, after all, is a f

Paying rapt attention, whether to a trout stream or a novel, a do-it-yourself project or a prayer, increases your capacity for concentration, expands your inner boundaries, and lifts your spirits, but more important, it simply makes you feel that life is worth living.

So what’s the way out? How do we avoid becoming lost in our own thoughts, projections, beliefs, and opinions? How do we begin to find our way out of this whole matrix of suffering? To begin with, we have to make a simple, yet very powerful observation: All thoughts—good thoughts, bad thoughts, lovely thoughts, evil thoughts—occur within something.

Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens. KABIR The heavy is the root of the light. The unmoved is the source of all movement. Thus the Master travels all day without leaving home. However splendid the views, she stays serenely in herself. Why should the lord of the country flit

The answers mirror a longing to feel that we are part of something larger than ourselves. Not only society, which is important enough, but something more. Nature has its own intelligence. In school, I learned that the spiritual was the opposite of the material, but in the woods these two are not opposites – they are equals. To walk reflects this.