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Published: March 25th 2009
Hard work and persistence is far better than instant satisfactions and simplifiers:
To escape the terrible simplifies one must recognize the actual danger of the condition which they obtain their ascendance over the frustrated majority: for the condition these characteristics profess to correct is in fact a serious one. Instead of closing out eyes to its existence we must turn art and reason to effect a benign simplification, which will give back authority to the human person. Life belongs to the free-living and mobile creatures, not to the encrusted ones; and to restore the initiative to life and participate in its renewal, we must counterbalance every fresh complexity, every mechanical refinement, every increase in quantitative goods or quantitative knowledge, every advance in manipulation technique, every threat of superabundance or surfeit, with stricter habits of evaluation, rejection, choice. To achieve the capacity we must consciously resist every kind of automatism: but nothing merely because it is advertised, use no invention merely because it has been put on the market, follow no practices merely because it is fashionable. We must approach every part of our lives with the spirit in which Thoreau undertook his housekeeping at Walden Pond: be ready, like him,
even to throw out a simple stone, if it proves too much trouble to dust. Otherwise, the sheer quantitative increase in the data of scientific knowledge will produce ignorance: and the constant increase in goods will produce a poverty of life...
-David E. Shi “In Search of the Simple Life”
As I travel more into this bicycle trip, my legs are becoming ever graceful and the thought of a car is turning rather offensive in my mind. It is a peaceful awareness knowing every morning my alarm clock will always be the sounds of hundreds of chirping birds, and without fail it's always a beautiful way to start the day. I wake and sleep with the rise and fall of the sun. The more I become one with my surroundings the more I become apart of that system, in my case Mother Nature. Rather than having to push myself away from the earth with my legs as I ride, resisting the Earth’s gravity, I now feel as though I am held up by some inner buoyancy, as though I am filled like a balloon with just enough helium to hover over the ground and barely touch it with
beauty
This is the tree above me while we were settling in for bed at the great open rice fieldmy feet. It is as if I am in perfect athletic condition, as after a year of intense exercise, only far more coordinated and light.
Two hundred miles in two days, I rest, and as I sat down on that rock, everything seemed close: the rugged outcrop on which I was sitting, the tall trees further down the slope and the other rolling hills on the horizon. And as I watched the limbs of the trees sway gently in the breeze, I experienced not just a visual perception of the event, but a physical sensation as well, as if the limbs moving in the wind were hairs on my body. I perceived everything to be somehow part of me. As I sat looking out at the landscape falling away from me in all directions, I felt exactly as if what I had always known as my physical body was only the head of a much larger body consisting of everything else I could see. I experienced the entire universe looking out on itself through my eyes. My realization was present that my life did not, in fact, begin with my conception at birth on this planet. It began much earlier
with the formation of the rest of me, my real body, the universe itself.
Please check out Keith's home page. You will be amazed by his talent. http://treetales.com/
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Todd
non-member comment
AWESOME!!
Patrick I must say your writing is poetic to say the least. Reading your post I truely feel as though I am along with you and Russ on your journey. Please continue with the post :)