{Soulful travel is the art of finding beauty even in ruins, even in inclement weather, even in foul moods. Like art, pilgrimage cannot wait for the right mood to appear. Like poetry, pilgrimage is beyond time and space. It happens now, or it doesn't happen at all.}
- The Art of Pilgrimage
Does this idea limit itself to pilgrimage? I'd argue that soulful living is about finding that same beauty every day - beauty in ruins, in the everyday, in the majestic, in the mundane, in the sublime. Soulful living is about seeing everything as if for the first time, smelling scents as if newly discovering them, celebrating the quiddity of each object, landscape and experience. Marvelling at the transparence of a pane of glass or cellophane wrapper. Feeling the strength and texture of an oak table and romancing the idea of its story, from seedling to harvest. How many storms did this tree weather? What families of birds and squirrels called its branches home? Who felled this oak, where did it travel, how was it chosen to fit a designer's blueprint, and how many layers of stain and shellac immortalized its grain? How many hungry souls have been comforted by a meal here? Where will it go, and how will it eventually return to the earth?
Ficus once showed us a gravel parking lot on Mount Seymour. To all appearances, it was an area that held no hope for life. Humans had removed the trees, bulldozed the land and covered the levelled earth with gravel. But when we knelt closer to the ground and really looked, we could see tiny hemlock saplings poking their way through the grey desolation. A forest in miniature.
The experience of that moment spiralled my imagination into a hurricane of perceived possibilities. I no longer see weeds growing out of cracks in the asphalt as convicting evidence of poor maintenance on the part of property owners... I see the unfolding of Mother Nature's latent forest in an area temporarily disturbed by man. Life finds a way.
The world is heartbreakingly beautiful when seen through the eyeglass of possibilities and impossibilities.
How can I express this? How does one share the enlightenment of beauty with everyone one loves?
