A Stroll On The Beach
“My life is like a stroll on the beach…as near to the edge as I can go.”
Henry David Thoreau, 1817 – 1862
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Pictures taken at sunset on Payyambalam Beach, Kannur
Finding Your Way
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“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”
Henry David Thoreau
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“In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for ”finding himself.” If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.”
Thomas Merton
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“We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.”
Lloyd Alexander
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“If we are incapable of finding peace in ourselves, it is pointless to search elsewhere.”
François de la Rochefoucauld
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“There comes a point in many people’s lives when they can no longer play the role they have chosen for themselves. When that happens, we are like actors finding that someone has changed the play.”
Brian Moore
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“.. a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life’s point of no return.”
Dag Hammarskjold
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“Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.”
Miguel de Unamuno
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Photographs taken at the Padmanabhapuram Palace
Launching Out Alone
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“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”
Henry David Thoreau
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And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O, my soul.
Walt Whitman
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Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food ..and change of clothes,
D.H. Lawrence
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Smoke
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Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
Henry David Thoreau
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“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.” Tom Stoppard
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“One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way.” Vincent van Gogh
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Neither Use Nor Ornament 