So Grand

Two weeks ago I visited this remarkable place. It is awesome in the old-fashioned sense of the word; I am filled with awe, and I feel I will somehow always be nourished by that awe. Yesterday I quoted David Whyte who suggested we need beautiful questions. The Grand Canyon is that—a beautiful, beautiful question.

Whyte's Wise Words

I just listened for the second time to Krista Tippet's interview with David Whyte. Below are some quotations from Whyte's interview that I loved even when I'm wasn't always sure what he meant.

I went back into poetry because I felt like scientific language wasn’t precise enough to describe the experiences that I had in Galapagos.

...we have so many allies in this world, including just the color blue in the sky, which we’re not paying attention to, or the breeze, or the ground beneath our feet. And so this is an invitation to come out of abstraction and back into the world again.

This is another delusion we have that we can get — take a sincere path in life without having our heart broken. And you think about the path of parenting, there’s never been a mother or father since the beginning of time who hasn’t had their heart broken by their children. And nothing traumatic has to happen. All they have to do is grow up.

Relationship Tip

From Alain de Botton:
...one of the kindest things that we can do with our lover is to see them as children. And not to infantilize them, but when we’re dealing with children as parents, as adults, we’re incredibly generous in the way we interpret their behavior. And if a child says — if you walk home, and a child says, “I hate you,” you immediately go, OK, that’s not quite true. Probably they’re tired, they’re hungry, something’s gone wrong, their tooth hurts, something. We’re looking around for a benevolent interpretation that can just shave off some of the more depressing, dispiriting aspects of their behavior. And we do this naturally with children, and yet we do it so seldom with adults...