Gravel Travel Quotes

Today Means Amen Dear you, whoever you are, however you got here, this is exactly where you are supposed to be. This moment has waited its whole life for you. This moment is your lover and you are a soldier. Come home, baby, it's over. You don't need to suffer anymore. Dear you, this moment is your surprise party. You are both hiding in the dark and walking through the door. This moment is a hallelujah. This moment is your permission slip to finally open that love letter you've been hiding from yourself, the one you wrote when you were little when you still danced like a sparkler at dusk. Do you remember the moment you realized they were watching? When you became ashamed of how much light you were holding? When you first learned how to unlove yourself? Dear you, the word today means amen in every language. Today, we made it. Today, I'm going to love you. Today, I'm going to love myself. Today, the boxcutter will rust in the garbage. The noose will forget how to hold you, today, today-- Dear you, and I have always meant you, nothing would be the same if you did not exist. You, whose voice is someone's favorite voice, someone's favorite face to wake up to. Nothing would be the same if you did not exist. You, the teacher, the starter's gun, the lantern in the night who offers not a way home, but the courage to travel farther into the dark. You, the lover, who worships the taste of her body, who is the largest tree ring in his heart, who does not let fear ration your love. You, the friend, the sacred chorus of how can I help. You, who have felt more numb than holy, more cracked than mosaic. Who have known the tiles of a bathroom by heart, who have forgotten what makes you worth it. You, the forgiven, the forgiver, who belongs right here in this moment. You, this clump of cells, this happy explosion that happened to start breathing, and by the grace of whatever is up there, you got here. You made it this whole way: through the nights that swallowed you whole, the mornings that arrived in pieces. The scabs, the gravel, the doubt, the hurt, the hurt, the hurt is over. Today, you made it. You made it. You made it here.

We were hockey gypsies, heading down another gravel road every weekend, plowing into the heart of that magnificent northern landscape. We never gave a thought to being deprived as we travelled, to being shut out of the regular league system. We never gave a thought to being Indian. Different. We only thought of the game and the brotherhood that bound us together off the ice, in the van, on the plank floors of reservation houses, in the truck stop diners where if we'd won we had a little to splurge on a burger and soup before we hit the road again. Small joys. All of them tied together, entwined to form an experience we would not have traded for any other. We were a league of nomads, mad for the game, mad for the road, mad for ice and snow, an Arctic wind on our faces and a frozen puck on the blade of our sticks.

1 The summer our marriage failed we picked sage to sweeten our hot dark car. We sat in the yard with heavy glasses of iced tea, talking about which seeds to sow when the soil was cool. Praising our large, smooth spinach leaves, free this year of Fusarium wilt, downy mildew, blue mold. And then we spoke of flowers, and there was a joke, you said, about old florists who were forced to make other arrangements. Delphiniums flared along the back fence. All summer it hurt to look at you. 2 I heard a woman on the bus say, “He and I were going in different directions.” As if it had something to do with a latitude or a pole. Trying to write down how love empties itself from a house, how a view changes, how the sign for infinity turns into a noose for a couple. Trying to say that weather weighed down all the streets we traveled on, that if gravel sinks, it keeps sinking. How can I blame you who kneeled day after day in wet soil, pulling slugs from the seedlings? You who built a ten-foot arch for the beans, who hated a bird feeder left unfilled. You who gave carrots to a gang of girls on bicycles. 3 On our last trip we drove through rain to a town lit with vacancies. We’d come to watch whales. At the dock we met five other couples—all of us fluorescent, waterproof, ready for the pitch and frequency of the motor that would lure these great mammals near. The boat chugged forward—trailing a long, creamy wake. The captain spoke from a loudspeaker: In winter gray whales love Laguna Guerrero; it’s warm and calm, no killer whales gulp down their calves. Today we’ll see them on their way to Alaska. If we get close enough, observe their eyes—they’re bigger than baseballs, but can only look down. Whales can communicate at a distance of 300 miles—but it’s my guess they’re all saying, Can you hear me? His laughter crackled. When he told us Pink Floyd is slang for a whale’s two-foot penis, I stopped listening. The boat rocked, and for two hours our eyes were lost in the waves—but no whales surfaced, blowing or breaching or expelling water through baleen plates. Again and again you patiently wiped the spray from your glasses. We smiled to each other, good troopers used to disappointment. On the way back you pointed at cormorants riding the waves— you knew them by name: the Brants, the Pelagic, the double-breasted. I only said, I’m sure whales were swimming under us by the dozens. 4 Trying to write that I loved the work of an argument, the exhaustion of forgiving, the next morning, washing our handprints off the wineglasses. How I loved sitting with our friends under the plum trees, in the white wire chairs, at the glass table. How you stood by the grill, delicately broiling the fish. How the dill grew tall by the window. Trying to explain how camellias spoil and bloom at the same time, how their perfume makes lovers ache. Trying to describe the ways sex darkens and dies, how two bodies can lie together, entwined, out of habit. Finding themselves later, tired, by a fire, on an old couch that no longer reassures. The night we eloped we drove to the rainforest and found ourselves in fog so thick our lights were useless. There’s no choice, you said, we must have faith in our blindness. How I believed you. Trying to imagine the road beneath us, we inched forward, honking, gently, again and again.

It was late afternoon. This time tomorrow he would be somewhere on a good graveled road, driving his car past things that happened to people, quicker than their happening. ("Death of a Traveling Salesman")

The driver and conductor on top were still, too, or only spoke at long intervals, in low tones, as is the way of men in the midst of invisible dangers. We listened to rain-drops pattering on the roof; and the grinding of the wheels through the muddy gravel; and the low wailing of the wind; and all the time we had that absurd sense upon us, inseparable from travel at night in a close-curtained vehicle, the sense of remaining perfectly still in one place, notwithstanding the jolting and swaying of the vehicle, the trampling of the horses, and the grinding of the wheels.

Wherever I may be, peace will be by my side. The tears I so often cried / Will all have dried / Bringing me rays of sunshine and happiness / To fill my life with warmth / And serenity / No longer scorned by the evil of others / A road of my own that I will travel / No hills, no curves, and no gravel. Giving a clear, open way to where I belong / Showing me love and how to be strong.

They [mountains] are portions of the heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot melted metals and stones. And as our hearts keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried sunlight—that is what it is. Now think: out of that caldron, where all the bubbles would be as big as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain bubbles have bubbled out and escaped—up and away, and there they stand in the cool, cold sky—mountains. Think of the change, and you will no more wonder that there should be something awful about the very look of a mountain: from the darkness—for where the light has nothing to shine upon, it is much the same as darkness—from the heat, from the endless tumult of boiling unrest—up, with a sudden heavenward shoot, into the wind, and the cold, and the starshine, and a cloak of snow that lies like ermine above the blue-green mail of the glaciers; and the great sun, their grandfather, up there in the sky; and their little old cold aunt, the moon, that comes wandering about the house at night; and everlasting stillness, except for the wind that turns the rocks and caverns into a roaring organ for the young archangels that are studying how to let out the pent-up praises of their hearts, and the molten music of the streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of the glaciers fresh-born. Think too of the change in their own substance—no longer molten and soft, heaving and glowing, but hard and shining and cold. Think of the creatures scampering over and burrowing in it, and the birds building their nests upon it, and the trees growing out of its sides, like hair to clothe it, and the lovely grass in the valleys, and the gracious flowers even at the very edge of its armour of ice, like the rich embroidery of the garment below, and the rivers galloping down the valleys in a tumult of white and green! And along with all these, think of the terrible precipices down which the traveller may fall and be lost, and the frightful gulfs of blue air cracked in the glaciers, and the dark profound lakes, covered like little arctic oceans with floating lumps of ice. All this outside the mountain! But the inside, who shall tell what lies there? Caverns of awfullest solitude, their walls miles thick, sparkling with ores of gold or silver, copper or iron, tin or mercury, studded perhaps with precious stones—perhaps a brook, with eyeless fish in it, running, running ceaseless, cold and babbling, through banks crusted with carbuncles and golden topazes, or over a gravel of which some of the stones are rubies and emeralds, perhaps diamonds and sapphires—who can tell?—and whoever can't tell is free to think—all waiting to flash, waiting for millions of ages—ever since the earth flew off from the sun, a great blot of fire, and began to cool. Then there are caverns full of water, numbing cold, fiercely hot—hotter than any boiling water. From some of these the water cannot get out, and from others it runs in channels as the blood in the body: little veins bring it down from the ice above into the great caverns of the mountain's heart, whence the arteries let it out again, gushing in pipes and clefts and ducts of all shapes and kinds, through and through its bulk, until it springs newborn to the light, and rushes down the mountain side in torrents, and down the valleys in rivers—down, down, rejoicing, to the mighty lungs of the world, that is the sea, where it is tossed in storms and cyclones, heaved up in billows, twisted in waterspouts, dashed to mist upon rocks, beaten by millions of tails, and breathed by millions of gills, whence at last, melted into vapour by the sun, it is lifted up pure into the air, and borne by the servant winds back to the mountain tops and the snow, the solid ice, and the molten stream.

This kitchen had been the home to my beloved kitchen utensils too. There was the hundred-year-old pestle and mortar that belonged to my late grandmother, a container made of Japanese cypress that I'd used for keeping rice, a Le Creuset enamel pot I'd bought with my first pay cheque, a set of long-serving chopsticks with extra fine tips I'd found in a specialty shop in Kyoto, an Italian paring knife given to me on my twentieth birthday by the owner of an organic-vegetables shop, a comfortable cotton apron, jade gravel I used for making pickled aubergine, and the traditional cast-iron nambu frying pan I'd travelled as far north as Morioka to buy. It was a collection of quality items built to last a lifetime.

We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped into the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two corridors united, and the floor was dusty from use, like a little highway over which much travel went. I was walking backward, in a crouching position, when I heard Antonia scream. She was standing opposite me, pointing behind me and shouting something in Bohemian. I whirled around, and there, on one of those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was sunning himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when Antonia screamed. When I turned, he was lying in loose waves, like a letter "W". He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big snake, I thought - he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my leg, and looked as if millstones couldn't crush the disgusting vitality out of him. He lifted his hideous little head , and rattled. I didn't run because I didn't think of it - if my back had been against a stone wall I couldn't have felt more cornered. I saw his coils tighten - now he would spring, spring his length, I remembered. I ran up and drove at his head with my spade, struck him fairly across the neck, and in a minute he was all about my feet in wavy loops. I struck now from hate. Antonia, barefooted as she was, ran up behind me. Even after I had pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back on itself. I walked away and turned my back. I felt seasick.

The howler monkeys had been right to laugh when he said he wasn’t going back. He had turned downriver again almost at once to fetch Maia, and he had made good time, traveling with the current--but he had come too late. Finn went outside again and stood on the square of raked gravel that had been the Carters’ garden. His mind seemed to have stopped working. He had no idea what to do. Should he go in to Manaus and see if he could find anything out--from the hospital perhaps? After a while he found himself walking back along the river path to where he had left the Arabella. As he came to the fork in the path which led back into the forest, the dog put his head down excitedly into a patch of leaf mold. Finn pushed him aside and saw a smear of blood…and then a little way off, another…and another. He almost fell over her, she lay so still, hidden in the leaves and creepers, almost as if she had burrowed into the forest to die. But she was not dead. She lay stunned, still in her nightdress, breathing lightly with closed eyes. The blood came from a gash in her leg. He could see no burns on her skin. She must have fainted from loss of blood. Then, when he said her name, she opened her eyes. One hand went out to his sleeve. “Can we go now?” she whispered. And he answered. “Yes.

The Brook Alfred Tennyson By Alfred Tennyson more Alfred Tennyson I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley. By thirty hills I hurry down, Or slip between the ridges, By twenty thorpes, a little town, And half a hundred bridges. Till last by Philip's farm I flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever. I chatter over stony ways, In little sharps and trebles, I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles. With many a curve my banks I fret By many a field and fallow, And many a fairy foreland set With willow-weed and mallow. I chatter, chatter, as I flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever. I wind about, and in and out, With here a blossom sailing, And here and there a lusty trout, And here and there a grayling, And here and there a foamy flake Upon me, as I travel With many a silvery waterbreak Above the golden gravel, And draw them all along, and flow To join the brimming river For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever. I steal by lawns and grassy plots, I slide by hazel covers; I move the sweet forget-me-nots That grow for happy lovers. I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance, Among my skimming swallows; I make the netted sunbeam dance Against my sandy shallows. I murmur under moon and stars In brambly wildernesses; I linger by my shingly bars; I loiter round my cresses; And out again I curve and flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever.

Top Dog" If I could, I would take your grief, dig it up out of the horseradish field and grate it into something red and hot to sauce the shellfish. I would take the lock of hair you put in the locket and carry it in my hand, I would make the light strike everything the way it hit the Bay Bridge, turning the ironwork at sunset into waffles. If I could, I would blow your socks off, they would travel far, always in unison, past the dead men running, past the cranes standing in snow, beyond the roads we rode, so small in our little car, it was like riding in a miner's helmet. If I could I would make everyone vote and call their public servants to say, “No one was meant for this.” I would go back to the afternoon we made love in the tall grass under the full sun not far from the ravine where the old owner had flung hundreds of mink cages. I would memorize gateways to the afterworld, the electric third rail, the blond braid our girl has hanging down her back, the black guppy we killed at our friends’ when we unplugged the bubbler and the fish floated to the top, one eye up at the ceiling, the other at the blue gravel on the bottom of the tank. I would beg an audience with Sister Lucia, the last living of the children visited by Our Lady of Fatima, I would ask her about the weight of secrets, if they let her sleep or if she woke at night with a body on her body, if the body said, “Let's play top dog, first I'll lie on you, then you lie on me.” I would ask how she lived with revelation, the normal state of affairs amplified beyond God, bumped up to the Virgin Mother, who no doubt knew a few things, passed them on, quietly, and I would ask Lucia how she lived with knowing, how she could keep it under her hat, under wraps, button up, zip her lip, play it close to the vest, never telling, never using truth as a weapon.

Pilgrimage is an ancient practice in need of modern discovery-a physical, emotional and spiritual journey that goes inward, upward and outward. We live in an age that sees people drowning in questions, searching for answers and starved for purpose. Pilgrimage is a spiritual practice that reminds us of our sacred purpose-to grow closer to God. Whether we choose to believe it, we are all on a journey The trail winds and wiggles through this world, often obscured from view, but life's deepest questions are answered along its gravel.

A rock, a large piece of rock weathers off a cliff and dives deep into a pool of gushing water. Back washed, It journeys roughly and knocks of other rocks, smashing through the waves as it loses itself in scattered pieces except for its core. That core travels far and wide, it coarsely gets ground by gravel pieces smaller than itself and bullied by boulders all of which it bears up as it withstands the pressure of a distant journey off the shore. At some point, it gets dry and it encounters mud, it gets smeared dirty but the mud doesn't stick, the rain washes of the mud and it rolls off into the sand. It dances in the sand and dives into the bottom of the waves. Rising like a phoenix through the ashes, it emerges polished, looking more beautiful than it did when it got edged of the cliff. It rises a pebble, smooth and sleek. Coveted by rocks starting their dive. To be a pebble you have to run the turbulent tidal race.

As Dean MacCannell pointed out, “Anything that is remarked, even little flowers or leaves picked up off the ground and shown to a child, even a shoeshine or gravel pit, anything is potentially an attraction….Sometimes we have official guides and travelogues to assist us in this point. Usually we are on our own. How else do we know another person except as an ensemble of suggestions hollowed out from the universe of possible suggestions? How else do we begin to know the world?

Just deciding where to go on vacation can often test the marriage’s flexibility. One partner wants to do something physical and adventurous, like trying to outrun molten lava down a volcano; the other prefers something more restful, even spiritual, like raking gravel in a Buddhist monastery.

My mother’s father, Ahmed Musa Ibrahim, was an educated man, a travelled man, who had no time for these self-deluding patrician airs. He preferred to speak about justice and liberty and the right to self-fulfilment. He would pay for these words in due course. He had spent two years at Makerere College in Uganda and one year at Edinburgh University in Scotland, completing a Diploma in Public Health.

He seemed surprised to hear from me now, his tone holding a note of shock. “Saint, how are you? What can I do for you?” “Kenneth. I just heard about the new volunteer counselor. I was hoping to get a copy of his credentials. As you know, the situation with some of the kids is pretty tenuous and new people scare them,” I said. “Oh! Didn’t you know he was coming? He said he had been approved months ago but he had delayed his start date due to traveling out of state for a family death. His name is Roland Cunningham. He’s been a high school counselor for fifteen years and now he’s semi-retired and wants to give back. He says that he saw so many gay kids who needed an ear.” I rolled my eyes so hard I almost hurt myself and Rio frowned at me questioningly. I shook my head and pulled in one deep breath before I spoke. “No, he hasn’t been approved for months. I’ve never heard of him. I suspect he’s a spy who belongs to Clay Greene.” I could hear Kenneth suck air, then chuckle disbelievingly. “Oh, no, Saint. That’s impossible. He had a copy of a volunteer application that you signed and dated in January. You probably just forgot, I know you’ve had a lot on your mind with your sister and everything.” I heard him click his tongue and had to work to not reach through the phone and wring his neck. “He’s going to make sure the kids have someone else to talk to. Don’t worry about it, I’m taking care of everything.” Rio’s frown had morphed into mild alarm, and I wasn’t sure what my face was doing that was causing it but whatever it was must have been interesting. He edged closer as I took several deep breaths. “Kenneth. Listen to me. You need to be cautious. Have you seen the security reports from Mr. Rao? Did make sure you let him know about this Cunningham? Did you run the background check?” “I glanced through the reports, yes, but no, I didn’t tell him about Roland. Mr. Rao is the night guard and Roland is scheduled for afternoons.” He chuckled lightly. “I didn’t see the overlap.” I did not grind my teeth, but it was a near thing. Rio hovered, not touching me, which I was grateful for. Once I got off this phone I was going to go off. “What about the background check, Ken? You know the background check policy.” “Oh, yes,” Kenneth said. “We did the background check. Completely clean, exemplary record with several awards from his career. Really, you need to calm down. I have it all under control.” “Right,” I said. “Well, I’ll let you get back to it then, Ken. Thank you.” I hung up before Kenneth could reply and Rio looked at me warily. “I am going to have him kicked off the board so fast his fucking head is going to spin. Shouldn’t be too hard, it’s full of ball bearings and broken gravel,” I snarled. “So that didn’t go well,” Rio observed quietly. He was still hovering, clearly unsure of how best to handle me.

Twenty unsettling minutes later she dropped the pen on her stack of papers, and then leaned back in her chair. The time seemed to be dragging like a immobile car without tires hooked to a tow-truck with square wheels traveling cautiously down a road of fresh gravel. Tess struggled to maintain focus, similar to how an alternator belt would struggle if it had to try to keep traction on a turn spindle that had been lubricated after an antifreeze leak. And similar to the—would be—alternator on the sidelines of that metaphor, Tess’s enthusiasm for her after hours work was having difficulty in keeping charged up also.

This I need to be told?” she’d snapped. As if, sitting in this kitchen where she felt the disapproving presence of his dead mother, she could forget where he’d grown up. Cole was the youngest of six children, with five sisters who’d traveled no farther than the bottom of the hollow, where Dad Widener had deeded each daughter an acre on which to build a house when she married, meanwhile saving back the remainder of the sixty-acre farm for his only son, Cole. The family cemetery was up behind the orchard. The Wideners’ destiny was to occupy this same plot of land for their lives and eternity, evidently. To them the word town meant Egg Fork, a nearby hamlet of a few thousand souls, nine churches, and a Kroger’s. Whereas Lusa was a dire outsider from the other side of the mountains, from Lexington—a place in the preposterous distance. And now she was marooned behind five sisters-in-law who flanked her gravel right-of-way to the mailbox.

THINK OF THE WAY a stretch of grass becomes a road. At first, the stretch is bumpy and difficult to drive over. A crew comes along and flattens the surface, making it easier to navigate. Then, someone pours gravel. Then tar. Then a layer of asphalt. A steamroller smooths it; someone paints lines. The final surface is something an automobile can traverse quickly. Gravel stabilizes, tar solidifies, asphalt reinforces, and now we don’t need to build our cars to drive over bumpy grass. And we can get from Philadelphia to Chicago in a single day. That’s what computer programming is like. Like a highway, computers are layers on layers of code that make them increasingly easy to use. Computer scientists call this abstraction. A microchip—the brain of a computer, if you will—is made of millions of little transistors, each of whose job is to turn on or off, either letting electricity flow or not. Like tiny light switches, a bunch of transistors in a computer might combine to say, “add these two numbers,” or “make this part of the screen glow.” In the early days, scientists built giant boards of transistors, and manually switched them on and off as they experimented with making computers do interesting things. It was hard work (and one of the reasons early computers were enormous). Eventually, scientists got sick of flipping switches and poured a layer of virtual gravel that let them control the transistors by punching in 1s and 0s. 1 meant “on” and 0 meant “off.” This abstracted the scientists from the physical switches. They called the 1s and 0s machine language. Still, the work was agonizing. It took lots of 1s and 0s to do just about anything. And strings of numbers are really hard to stare at for hours. So, scientists created another abstraction layer, one that could translate more scrutable instructions into a lot of 1s and 0s. This was called assembly language and it made it possible that a machine language instruction that looks like this: 10110000 01100001 could be written more like this: MOV AL, 61h which looks a little less robotic. Scientists could write this code more easily. Though if you’re like me, it still doesn’t look fun. Soon, scientists engineered more layers, including a popular language called C, on top of assembly language, so they could type in instructions like this: printf(“Hello World”); C translates that into assembly language, which translates into 1s and 0s, which translates into little transistors popping open and closed, which eventually turn on little dots on a computer screen to display the words, “Hello World.” With abstraction, scientists built layers of road which made computer travel faster. It made the act of using computers faster. And new generations of computer programmers didn’t need to be actual scientists. They could use high-level language to make computers do interesting things.* When you fire up a computer, open up a Web browser, and buy a copy of this book online for a friend (please do!), you’re working within a program, a layer that translates your actions into code that another layer, called an operating system (like Windows or Linux or MacOS), can interpret. That operating system is probably built on something like C, which translates to Assembly, which translates to machine language, which flips on and off a gaggle of transistors. (Phew.) So, why am I telling you this? In the same way that driving on pavement makes a road trip faster, and layers of code let you work on a computer faster, hackers like DHH find and build layers of abstraction in business and life that allow them to multiply their effort. I call these layers platforms.

When fish nociceptors fire, the signals travel to parts of the brain that deal with learning and other behaviors more complex than simple reflexes. Sure enough, when the animals are pinched, shocked, or injected with toxins, they’ll behave differently for hours or days—or until they get painkillers. They’ll make sacrifices to get those drugs, or to avoid further discomfort. In one experiment, Sneddon showed that zebrafish prefer to swim in an aquarium full of plants and gravel than in one that’s empty. But if she injected the fish with acetic acid and dissolved a painkiller in the water of the barren aquarium, they abandoned their normal preferences and chose the boring but soothing environment instead. In another study, Sarah Millsopp and Peter Laming trained goldfish to feed in a specific part of an aquarium, and then gave them an electric shock. The fish fled and stayed away for days, forgoing food in the process. They eventually returned, but did so more quickly if they were hungry or if the shock had been mild. Their initial escape might have been reflexive, but they then weighed up the pros and cons of avoiding further harm. As Braithwaite wrote in her book, Do Fish Feel Pain?, “There is as much evidence that fish feel pain and suffer as there is for birds and mammals.

My mother’s father, Ahmed Musa Ibrahim, was an educated man, a travelled man, who had no time for these self-deluding patrician airs. He preferred to speak about justice and liberty and the right to self-fulfilment.

Montaigne was a French courtier who retired from political life in 1571 to sit in a castle tower and reflect on vanity and happiness, on liars and friendship. While he found comfort in this solitude, pain intruded on his contemplation from time to time, thanks to his kidney stones. One day, Montaigne transformed the stones into grist for an essay. “It is likely I inherited the gravel from my father,” Montaigne guessed, “for he died sadly afflicted by a large stone in the bladder.” Yet Montaigne had no idea how one could inherit a disease, as opposed to a crown or a farm. His father had been in perfect health when Montaigne was born, and remained so for another twenty-five years. Only in his late sixties did his kidney stones first appear, and they then tormented him for the last seven years of his life. “While he was still so remote from the disease, how could the light trifle of his substance out of which he built me convey so deep an impress?” Montaigne wondered. “Where could the propensity have been brooding all this while?” Simply musing in this way was a visionary act. No one in Montaigne’s day thought of traits as being distinct things that could travel down through generations. People did not reproduce; they were engendered. Life unfolded as reliably as the rising of bread or the fermenting of wine. Montaigne’s doctors did not picture a propensity lurking in parents and then being reproduced in their children. A trait could not disappear and be rediscovered, like a hidden letter. Doctors did sometimes observe certain diseases that were common in certain families. But they didn’t think very much about why that was so. Many simply turned to the Bible for guidance, citing the passage telling of God “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.

Ancient roads we want to travel, And our foot upon the gravel, Paths for us to explore, The trails beyond the shore. Touched by the gryphon's wing, Beyond common censure, Drawn to the dusty road, Beware of the adventure, Touched by a gryphon's wing. Highways lead us somewhere too far, Far away from our childhood home, To chase the distant star, A happy life just lived to roam. Touched by the gryphon's wing, Beyond common censure, Drawn to the dusty road, Beware of the adventure, Touched by a gryphon's wing.

There is no greater work of minimalist art than the dry garden in the Zen Buddhist temple of Ryōan-ji, Kyoto. This comprises fifteen rocks of various sizes set in a sea of white, raked gravel; almost nothing, but you could look at it for hours. It was made about 500 years before the modernist architect Mies van der Rohe remarked that less is more.

The setting of our urgent lives is an intricate maze whose blind corridors we learn one by one—village street, ocean vessel, forested slope—without remembering how or where they connect in space. You travel, settle, move on, stay put, go. You point your car down the riverside road to the blurred foot of the mountain. The mountain rolls back from the floodplain and hides its own height in its trees. You get out, stand on gravel, and cool your eyes watching the river move south. You lean on the car’s hot hood and look up at the old mountain, up the slope of its green western flank. It is September; the golden-rod is out, and the asters. The tattered hardwood leaves darken before they die. The mountain occupies most of the sky. You can see where the route ahead through the woods will cross a fire scar, will vanish behind a slide of shale, and perhaps reemerge there on that piny ridge now visible across the hanging valley—that ridge apparently inaccessible, but with a faint track that fingers its greenish spine. You don’t notice starting to walk; the sight of the trail has impelled you along it, as the sight of the earth moves the sun.

Alone You Must Travel'.. O' Sojourner, alone you must travel, For darkness becomes the advent of dawn as the hours burn every agony, and the tongue finds a voice that stayed mute for long. In the gathering of ecstasy, the lips give you freedom, Alone you must seek the elixir, For in such seeking, the thrush in you flies in an expanse. And so, you become a rider of the tides, Awakened, to the deepest of your dreams. With sails unfurled, await the winds of life, for in it, you will sense, the vast sea of silence. And so, you become the river of peace, rushing to meet the ocean afar. And you disappear, as a drop into an ocean. Emptied, you rise, to find the sky, gilded in morn, for the dark announced the dawn. Your heart so full, a chalice of wine, For from the longing, flows a fountain of delight. A seeker of solitude, found the gladdest hour, For in silence, your flames burn high; In the dark, you are a spirit of light, for your eyes hunger, crying aloud for flight. O' Sojourner, in the quest of utmost, for long, you have traveled, near and afar, Deep was your thirst, for the faraway land, that held your desires and the deepest burning. Deep was your hunger that tore apart the veils. In the dark, you found a wakefulness to light, for you have felt the ecstasy, as the weeping turned into laughter. Forsaking earthly pleasures, you feast on otherworldly desires. The night that came to prune your pleasures, gave you the wings of a light, so eternal. The path though, is of gravel and dust, Yet, luminous are you, in the dawn of gold; The longing that burns you, crowns you in light.