Be filled with the Spirit of the Beatitudes: joy, simplicity, mercy. Joy begins within. Perfect joy lies in the utter simplicity of peaceful love. In order to shine out, such joy requires no less than your whole being. Perfect joy is self-giving. Whoever knows it seeks neither gratitude nor kindness. It is sheer wonder renewed by the sight of the generosity of the Giver of all gifts -- material and spiritual. It is thankfulness. It is thanksgiving. Simplicity lies in the free joy of those who keep their heart and mind fixed on Divine Light and Love. Those who live in mercy are neither oversensitive nor constantly disappointed. They give themselves simply, forgetting themselves -- joyfully with all their heart; freely, not looking for anything in return.
From trains to automobiles to airplanes, each time the speed of connection quickens, travelers have expressed a sense of growing alienation from the land blurring past our windows... a faster connection palpably diminishes our ability to experience the richness of the physical world: A person texting her friends or riding on a bullet train is connected very quickly to her ends, but in doing so, she skips over the immensely complex terrain that lies between those two points... the faster we travel, the more intensely we feel our lack of relationship with the land we traverse.
~ Robert Moor in ON TRAILS: AN EXPLORATION