The Age of Magic

‘Do you know what the luckiest thing is?’
‘No.’
‘It is to be at home everywhere.’

There’s wisdom in repetition, in going to the same place often, seeing the same painting again and again, re-reading a much loved book.’

‘Most people would say repetition is boring.’

‘The young maybe.’

Do you know what the luckiest thing is?

No.

It is to be at home everywhere.

Some things only become clear much later.

People are afraid of what they dont know.

What can you do with all this beauty? The frosted peaks, the silver lake, the light, this dawn?’ Lao asked. ‘It fills my heart, I want to do something with it, and I don’t know what.’

‘I think the first seeing, the first mis-reading is the truest.’

‘Why? You didn’t think so before. You used to say thrice is once.’

‘I still do. But I think something of our deeper selves lives in the magic of first encounters. We try later to recapture that first enchantment, but only rare experiences reawaken it.’

I seem to make my own misery.

When we are young we set out with dreams. In the middle of the journey of our lives we find perhaps that we have lost our way. At the end we find the origin; and we begin again.

The real reading begins when the first reading is over.