“Gary Paulsen’s memoir Winterdance describes a man running the Iditarod, the Alaskan dog team race, only to vanish. Everyone thought he’d fallen through a patch of sea ice and drowned, and Paulsen drilled himself in remembering details about the man to share with his bereaved friends and relations.

But the man survived. The ice on which he had been racing broke off from the mainland, a crag so huge that the man didn’t notice that he was lost for an entired day. He was rescued at last, but got no credit (or brass belt buckle) for finishing the race. But Paulsen says, “He didn’t care. He’d found god out there on the ice alone.”

Is the divine waiting outside for you, too? Religious seekers throughout history have undertaken pilgrimages in search of revelation. If you’re having trouble reaching your destination, consider that sometimes the best way to find it is to get lost.”

From Earth Bound: Daily Meditations for All Seasons by Brian Nelson

“Since we humans have the better brain, isn’t it our responsibility to protect our fellow creatures from, oddly enough, ourselves?

… Wildlife is something which man cannot construct. Once it is gone, it is gone forever. Man can rebuild a pyramid, but he can’t rebuild ecology, or a giraffe.”

Joy Adamson, naturalist (1910 – 1980), born on this day

“It used to make me unhappy, all that feeling. I just didn’t know what to do with it. But now I’ve learned how to make feeling work for me… I don’t know, I just want to feel as much as I can, it’s what ‘soul’ is all about.”

Janis Joplin (1943 – 1970), born on this day

“In the quiet hours when we are alone and there is nobody to tell us what fine fellows we are, we come sometimes upon a moment in which we wonder, not how much money we are earning, nor how famous we have become, but what good we are doing.”

A. A. Milne (1882 – 1956), born on this day

“Rest but never quit. Even the sun has a sinking spell each evening. But it always rises the next morning. At sunrise, every soul is born again.”

Muhammad Ali (1942 – 2016), born on this day

“Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926)

“This would be an unbearable world were God to have only a single light, but we may be consoled that God has two lights: a light to guide us in the brightness of the day when hopes are fulfilled and circumstances are favorable, and a light to guide us in the darkness of the midnight when we are thwarted and the slumbering giants of gloom and hopelessness rise in our souls.”

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – 1968), born on this day

“You are closer to me than I am, God.
You shine through my chaos and confusion
from my innermost self.
You know my weak points and my hurt places,
the habits I resort to and the goals that sustain me.
You well up in me.
You hold me in the palm of your hand.
I can’t quite grasp this – it’s just too big.
Understanding flits by in the corner of my mind
and is quickly gone.
You’re in all of this from the big bang to
the outer edge of space and time.
You are the seed at my center from my birth to now
to my death and beyond.
Deep in every growing bone, every forming love,
every struggled thought.
There is nowhere that you that you are not.
Search me, try me, purify me.
Lead me to the way of Oneness with you.”

Psalm 139 reimagined by Christine Robinson

“”A home,” wrote Solomon the Wise, “is built with wisdom.” And not with a hammer. Because wisdom is the glue of beauty. Wisdom, meaning the ability to step back and see all of the picture, the past and, most important, the future to which all this leads. To see the truth inside each thing. Without wisdom, there are only fragments. With wisdom, there is a whole. And there is peace between all the parts of that whole.”

Rabbi Tzvi Freeman, with art by Egon Tschirch

“Know the difference between the false dawn and the true, distinguish the colour of the wine from the colour of the cup, that, perchance, from the eyes which see the seven colours, patience and waiting may produce a spiritual eye, with which you may behold colours other than these, and may behold pearls instead of stones. What pearl? Nay, you will become an ocean, you will become a sun traversing the sky.”

From Masnavi by Rumi, translated by Richard Nicholson