To step away from the world isn't to draw back; it's actually a way to tune in.
Writing of every kind is a way to wake oneself up and keep as alive as when one has just fallen in love.
Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you're really seeing are not his limitations but yours.
The ultimate purpose of Zen,' I remembered the roshi telling me, 'is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it's a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion.
The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.
Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year - or at least forty-five hours - and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand.
In barely one generation, we've moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them - often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
It's only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day.