
“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese.
I recently stumbled on this quote and thought it was worth sharing. To me, while “off balance” is certainly a good description, I find that over time I cling less to the desire for traditional balance and more to the desire for earth and sky and stars and crisp clean air in my lungs.
Still, there is often a brutality, and I think it can be misleading to tell folks otherwise. This photo might be a good example, a beautiful sunrise and yet that was the first morning we woke to a hard deep frost…the cold was really biting and there was ice on our fuel bottles.