Life as a Pilgrimage of Discovery

Ideally, a human life should be a constant pilgrimage of discovery. The most exciting discoveries happen at the frontiers. When you come to know something new, you come closer to yourself and to the world. Discovery enlarges and refines your sensibility. When you discover something, you transfigure some of the forsakenness of the world. Nature comes to know itself anew in your discoveries. Creative human thought adds to the brightness of the world. Yet there is a strong seam of thought which has always de-animated nature and reduced the earth to a mere playground for the worst fantasies of human greed. Why is this? Such blind and destructive perception is often secretly driven by guilt. There is profound but subtle cosmological guilt in human beings. We even communicate guilt to our dogs! Yet the animal world often offers images of pure discovery. My neighbour’s pony had a beautiful brown foal early in the spring. In the first days, she followed her mother awkwardly on the uneven ground with her long, new, gangly legs. One afternoon as they were both lying down, the new foal got up and moved away on her own a little more confidently, and then more swiftly with every step. Then, suddenly, she found she could move faster, and then she discovered that she could run. It was a marvelous sight. She started to run so swiftly and gracefully, her head held high, circling round and round the stony field. She was utterly ecstatic at the discovery of her new swiftness. She would come back time and again and halt before her mother as if to say: “Hey see what I can do.” Each one of us has made a huge discovery that we have never gotten over. This is the discovery of the world. Our first journey was the journey to the earth and we are still travelling.