A NEW YEAR, HAT ON HEAD, BOOTS ON FEET

                                                    As the year concludes—

                                                    wanderer's hat on my head,

                                                    sandals on my feet

                                   

                                                                  Basho

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

           Anatole France 

         Not all who wander are lost.

            J.R.R. Tolkien

Never did I think so much, exist so vividly, and experience so much, never have I been so much myself—if I may use that expression—as in the journeys I have taken alone and on foot.

                                                        Jean-Jacques Rousseau

                                           
                                            We are the music makers,
                                            And we are the dreamers of dreams,
                                            Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
                                            And sitting by desolate streams;
                                            World-losers and world-forsakers,
                                            On whom the pale moon gleams:
                                            Yet we are the mover and shakers
                                            Of the world for ever, it seems.

          Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy 

This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering.  The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly becomes part of the tangible world.  It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may lie between you; it is yours now and for ever.

Freya Stark 

Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.

Ray Bradbury

                     Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least

                     possible baggage, and discover the world.

                     It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property,

                     triviality, to simply walk away.

                     That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, 

                     so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.

                                                     Thomas A. Clark

                                              from "In Praise of Walking"

Happy New Year to my treasured blogging friends!  May our paths continue to intersect, here and elsewhere.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

MERRY CHRISTMAS

FROM THE EASTERN SHORE OF MARYLAND

MAY YOUR HOLIDAYS BE FILLED WITH GRATITUDE AND WONDER

AND MAY THE COMING YEAR BRING YOU PEACE AND JOY

ABANDONED

Abandoned House, Crocheron, Maryland

On my occasional jaunts to a remote peninsula of Maryland's Eastern Shore, I am always fascinated by the abandoned houses I discover.  Often, I stop and poke around these old places—as I did recently with the house in this photo—hoping to find clues to what kind of people lived there, how they lived, and what caused them to suddenly abandon the place they once called home.  As the poet Ted Kooser reminds us in the poem below, abandoned houses have stories to tell us, not only about their prior inhabitants, but also about the transient nature of our own lives.

ABANDONED FARMHOUSE

by Ted Kooser

                                 He was a big man, says the size of his shoes

                                 on a pile of broken dishes by the house;

                                 a tall man too, says the length of the bed 

                                 in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,

                                 says the Bible with a broken back

                                 on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;

                                 but not a man for farming, say the fields

                                 cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

                                A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall

                                papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves

                                covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,

                                says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.

                                Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves

                                and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.

                                And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.

                                It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

                                Something went wrong, says the empty house

                                in the weed-choked yard.  Stones in the fields

                                say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars

                                in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.

                                And the child?  Its toys are strewn in the yard

                                like branches after a storm—a rubber cow,

                                a rusty tractor with a broken plow,

                                a doll in overalls.  Something went wrong, they say.

Note:  Ted Kooser served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress between 2004 and 2006.  During his second term, he also won the Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems, Delights & Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004).