Thank you for allowing me to be a human being.*
(St Clare of Assisi)

One cannot know the rivers till one has seen them at their sources; but this journey to the sources must not be taken lightly.**
(Nan Shepherd)

Nan Shepherd was describing actual rivers in the Cairngorms but I snatch her words for human lives, how we must go to the sources of our lives to understand them, to be the people we can be and want to be.

These journeys are hard; there are many temptations to face on the way.

Temptations not to begin to look more closely, or to give up when it becomes demanding, to switch the journey for an easier one, to end up thinking too much of ourselves, or too little.

To make these journeys, though, is what it is to be human.

(*St Clare of Assisi, quoted in Richard Rohr’s The Divine Dance.)
(**From Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain.)