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    Journeys of Simplicity: Traveling Light with Thomas Merton, Bashō, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard & Others
    Journeys of Simplicity: Traveling Light with Thomas Merton, Bashō, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard & Others
    Journeys of Simplicity: Traveling Light with Thomas Merton, Bashō, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard & Others
    Ebook127 pages46 minutes

    Journeys of Simplicity: Traveling Light with Thomas Merton, Bashō, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard & Others

    By Philip Harnden

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    About this ebook

    Where do our journeys take us?
    What do we leave behind?
    What do we carry with us?
    How do we find our way?

    You are invited to consider a more graceful way of traveling through life. With arresting clarity, Journeys of Simplicity offers vignettes of forty travelers and the few, ordinary things they carried with them—from place to place, from day to day, from birth to death.

    Edward Abbey Nellie Bly Raymond Carver
    Dorothy Day Marcel Duchamp Dolores Garcia
    /Emma “Grandma” Gatewood Mohandas Gandhi
    Peter Matthiessen William Least Heat Moon
    John Muir Robert Pirsig Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton
    Henry David Thoreau Father Zossima and others

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurner Publishing Company
    Release dateJan 6, 2011
    ISBN9781594733628
    Journeys of Simplicity: Traveling Light with Thomas Merton, Bashō, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard & Others
    Author

    Philip Harnden

    Philip Harnden was the publisher of The Other Side, a magazine of spirituality and social action, for a dozen years. A Quaker, he has written on subjects as diverse as the land rights of Native Americans and the spiritual life of Fritz Eichenberg. A former correspondent for Religion News Service, Harnden has also been a commentator on North Country Public Radio. He lives in northern New York State, not far from the Canadian border.

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      Journeys of Simplicity - Philip Harnden

      On Traveling Light

      Twelve hundred years ago in China a middle-aged man named P’ang Yün loaded everything he owned onto a boat and sank it all in the Tung-t’ing Lake. After that, we are told, he lived like a single leaf.

      See him there in the early morning, treading water in the middle of the lake, watching the last bubbles rise from the depths. The air crisp and quiet. The lake misty and as still as sky. Then turning, stroking toward the shore.

      Justine Dalencourt, a French Quaker, was forced to leave her home at Fontaine-Lavaganne when the German army invaded France in 1914. But first she planted her garden, saying, I would rather they found something to eat at my house than that they should have to steal from others.

      See her kneeling, covering the last seed. Patting down the moist soil. The warm spring sun. The full scent of the earth rising to her. The odd and distant thunder. Then standing, turning, walking away.

      Traveling light—imagine this meaning: unencumbered journeying, a graceful way of traveling through life like a single leaf. Now imagine another: the light by which we journey, the light that shows the way. Our traveling light.

      What would it mean to live like a single leaf? What would it mean to make one’s life a journey of simplicity? a journey unencumbered, uncluttered, without distraction—a journey of focus and intention? a journey of lightness and light?

      Quakers say a divine flame shines within each being. Every being. All beings. Would such a Light remind us that, after they steal our homes, the soldiers will be hungry? And to see that Deep Light—in ourselves, in others—must we first sink the boat?

      In 1889, at age seventeen, my grandfather left family and friends in Sweden and sailed to America. He packed all his worldly goods in a small wooden chest. Today I have that chest near my writing desk. Its wooden slats weave around a rectangular frame; the hinged lid curves upward. The wood itself, now broken in places, has darkened.

      Pondering this old chest, I see a young farm boy, fear and adventure in his eyes, setting aside all but the essential as he packs for his journey, summoning from within himself a quiet simplicity. I watch him board a boat in the early morning mist and launch into the deep.

      I have not traveled much myself, but I do keep some handsome suitcases in my attic. Also two backpacks, three knapsacks, a duffel bag, a briefcase, several tote bags, a canvas rucksack, an ash-woven pack basket, three sleeping bags, and a tent or two. Looking at my grandfather’s wooden chest, I realize it could not possibly hold everything I now require for a summer picnic. And unlike P’ang Yün, I cannot imagine where I would find a boat large enough to row all I own to the middle of some lake. Evidently, I intend to keep my worldly goods very much

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