From the Soul of a Pilgrim.

Ideally, a human life should be a constant pilgrimage of discovery. The most exciting discoveries happen at the frontiers. When you come to know something new, you come closer to yourself and to the world. Discovery enlarges and refines your sensibility. When you discover something, you transfigure some of the forsakenness of the world. —John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes

Source: The Soul of a Pilgrim, Christine Valtners Paintner.

Slow: Something to think about on a wet bank holiday.

Fast and slow do more than just describe a rate of change.

There are shorthand for ways of being or philosophies of life.

Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity over quality.

Slow is the opposite, calm, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality over quantity

It is about making real and meaningful connections with people, culture, work, food, everything.

Source: Carl Honore, In Praise of Slow.

#Reading

Thinking for yourself.

"In this context it is important to remember to protect our independence and to have the confidence to express our native creativity.

(The writer is commenting here, on H.G. Wells remarks about becoming automatons)

To be aware that that our beliefs, our dreams and opinions have no need to be other people's second hand-notions.

It's important to remember the value of thinking for oneself, which is best done in silence."

Source: The Spirit of Silence, John Lane

#reading

Painting in calm and silence.

I've been reading about the value of silence in our lives. I noticed how noisy are our lives the first night at home after my treatment for pancreatic cancer in hospital. 

The ward was a constantly noisy place, even at night. My bedroom was so quiet on the first night, I couldn't sleep.

In 'The Spirit of Silence', John Lane writes of Paul Cezanne, his work 

Arises out of a ground of calm and silence.

Cezanne is described by John Lane as not beginning with a belief in a transcendent reality but with fidelity to observed facts.

Unsatisfied with the Impressionist dictum that painting is primarily a reflection of visual perception, Cézanne sought to make of his artistic practice a new kind of analytical discipline. In his hands, the canvas itself takes on the role of a screen where an artist's visual sensations are registered as he gazes intensely, and often repeatedly, at a given subject.

Time and silence are the bedrock of this kind of reflection on what we see before us all.

Source: The story of art.

Finding meaning in a busy, noisy world.

#myreading

The sole cause of man's unhappiness is he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Blaise Pascal

You do you don't need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen.

Don't even listen simply wait.

Don't even wait, be still and solitary.

The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.

Franz Kafka

Source: The Spirit of Silence, John Lane