compass point

My friend Marty Stortz, who writes a blog titled the Progress of Pilgrimage, has recently moved to Minneapolis.  In today's post she evokes the image of orientation.  That has to do with using a compass.  Moving through space, wilderness, or even campus using compass rather than a map requires a different sort of attention to landscape and landmarks.  Perhaps navigating by compass allows us to explore and discover in ways that we don't when following map-quest generated directions.


This pondering takes me back to my first and second posts and to the purpose for these blogs.  Surely their purposes include to identify the cardinal directions that orient us and to record landmarks along the way. The course theme, "Freedoms," is a sort of "true North" that helps us make our way through the readings and conversations.  Whatever we encounter we will observe with one eye focused on Freedom; but, we won't forget its twin, that is equality. Today I won't spin this analogy out too far.


If I were keeping an old style common place book, I would pick up my best fountain pen to carefully copy out this bit of Mary Oliver's poem "Sometimes" in my most legible hand writing because these four lines are like a trail marker for a life of learning.  Here I must content myself with purple "ink."

4. 

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

[I must look for the complete citation at home.]