If there is a lesson in travel – and I make the gentle distinction here between Travel, where you open yourself to change, and Tourism, where the scenes and faces pass in front of you in cinematic splendor – if there is a lesson in travel, it is that time is much longer than your pockets-full of days, and earth much larger than the bag of bones and sinew you temporarily call home.

There are some writings to which you are close enough, in historical moment and the nuance of language, that each word falls like a spark on your skin, an electric current to the wire of your life.

Others are foreign even in translation, even after the attempt to make them current or accessible to a modern sensibility. Those are the words that might make a difference, that will stretch you skyward and allow you to see out from the box you have comfortably called home for so long.

In simple faith the kingdom is won. What money buys is bread alone. What money buys are the works of women and the works of men; with a simpler faith you win the spirit’s coin.

One teacher said, the heart can see the kingdom on earth, if the guise of maturity is stripped away. If the fears and angers we don like dust-filled clothing is cast away, we will be as naked of mistrust as young children. Then our actions are pure; then the whole world is ahead of us, and every beauty will have its day.

The mind’s eye is easily occluded, as simply and as naturally as clouds form and veil the face of the Sun. Or the eye’s perception may be overwhelmed by the colors and the kaleidoscopic movement of the world. If that eye is clouded, we experience the surfaces of things; beautiful, plentiful, absorbing. But in all places the eye of the mind can seek further, see deeper, and finally deliver greater satisfaction as one becomes part of the environment, and the environment becomes part of you.