days like these

i love days like today because i get to settle into being.

i woke up fairly early for a day off and began reading. since i have been off work for three days now, i have finished reading three books. i love to read and rarely have enough time to do so with teaching.

i am reading the book blue highways by William Least Heat-Moon. it has turned out to be much better than i expected. it is a story of a pilgrimage of sorts on back roads and byways of america across north, south, east, and west. i am enjoying it immensely.

he writes" maybe the road could provide a therapy through observation of the ordinary and obvious, a means whereby the outer opens an inner one. stop, look, listen, the old railroad crossing signs warned. Whitman calls it "the profound lesson of reception." new ways of seeing can disclose new things: the radio telescope revealed quasars and pulsars, and the scanning electron microscope showed the whiskers of the dust mite. but turn the question around: do new things make for new ways of seeing?"

after an experience of eating supper with an impoverished family he wrote, "down along the ridge, i wondered why it's always those who live on little who are the ones who ask you to dinner."

yes, friends, this book is shaping up to be a great reminder of pilgrimage. just when i forget or the days of walking miles and miles seems far away, i read something that reminds me. i need this.

i scurried out of bed, packed the book in a bag, and biked to yoga. i went to a class with a different instructor today and it was wonderful. she reminded all of us that no matter how many times she tells us we are divine and beautiful that it will take our own journeys of casting aside the layers in order to believe it. today for a few moments, i believed it.

i biked around my old college campus. biked around down town. met up with some friends. biked home. i also had great conversations over the phone with some friends i haven't talked to in ages.

all felt well today. i felt relaxed, at peace, loved.

days like these past few make me feel whole, and remind me to look at others in wholeness and not in brokenness.

hope your day felt well.