Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia)

Mushroomic ramblings:

“To make living itself an art, that is the goal”

“When we are completely alive we need no mail carriers, no telegraph or telephone lines. We do not even need wings. We are there, everywhere, without making a move.”

“More and more clearly I see that the solution lies wholly with me. It is I who have to change, I who must exhibit more faith and trust, more confidence in life itself.”

Thus in the search for paradise, it does not necessarily need to reflect the place where you are. It is finding a spot … a moment, the crossing of space-time vectors where you are completely comfortable with yourself knowing who you are and being satisfied with it and knowing that nothing else matters. Somewhere deep in a glen in a dark hollow in the woods out in the mountains of Oaxaca I found that moment. Knowing that the earth was breathing life into me. The pines like lungs, the Alice in Wonderland plants glowing, the beetle crawling across our path. Knowing that I was on the right path was enough to see that I had found a certain from of paradise.

“Most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior. Man is not suffering from the ravages wrought by earthquakes and volcanoes, by tornadoes and tidal waves; he is suffering from his own misdeeds, his own foolishness, his own ignorance and disregard of natural laws.”

When we understand where we are, who we are, then we have the tools to live a life worth living. And our knowledge may come from many sources but wisdom comes from living that life.

“A man can only prove that he is free by electing to do so. And he can only do so when he realizes that he himself made himself unfree.”

And lying in the hammock, I felt free like I had chosen the path to be where I was and that I felt grateful to the earth, my parents, my friends, God whatever s/he/it is that put me in that spot. And the hammock was my space in the universe. Content and happy knowing that I was free. With a lookout over the Pacific, the world. In my command center.

“What see and knows has no need of spectacles and theories. All our striving and struggling is in the nature of confession. It is a way of reminding ourselves that we are weak, ignorant, blind, helpless. Whereas we are not. We are as little or as much as we permit ourselves to think we are.”

And that is where it takes great strength to journey a difficult path but one that is right.It doesn’t take journeys thousands of miles long. But seeing that many people around the world are on their own journey makes one realize that we are either not alone or very alone depending on how you look at it. Knowing that we all struggle is comforting though.

“Everyone, even the most enlightened, has his private griefs and torments. Life is perpetual struggle, and struggle entails sorrow and suffering. And suffering gives us strength and character.”

And that is why traveling the path brings us closer to who we are no matter how far we are from home. Life is to see…

All quotes from Henry Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957)