I was thinking about how our perceptions change with age and how children can be a lot closer to reality as they see the world unclouded by the mental filters and preconceptions that build up in our adult lives. It reminded me of a quote by Peter Matthiessen, my favourite author and I went to my bookshelf to look it up;

“Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.”
― Peter Matthiessen

By coincidence, my daughter left on a trip to Cambodia today. She wanted to take something to read and last night asked for my suggestion. The answer was easy. Two well loved books that have accompanied me on all my travels and now accompany her.

The first is written by Pema Chodron and called ‘Awakening Loving Kindness’. With stunning clarity and insight, Pema has consolidated her exceptional wisdom and teachings into a concise volume which magically provides the right advice whenever you randomly open a page. This book has saved me more than once! It is a tiny book and my copy is well worn; the cover is torn, the edges grubby and pages dog eared with many folded down to mark passages that are especially significant. Pema Chodron is now 78 and lives at her monastery Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia.

The second book is Peter Matthiesson’s ‘Snow Leopard’. This book is a travel diary which describes a five week trek to Crystal Mountain in Tibet searching for Blue Sheep and Snow Leopard. The trek was undertaken in the 1970’s after Peter’s wife Deborah Love died of cancer. Beautifully written, in a lyrical style, it documents the author’s journey through the snow mountains along with a more personal journey through heart and mind. A sense of vastness, nature, space and subtlety, stunning imagery, gritty emotions, spiritual presence, clarity and insight are woven together in an inspiring volume. No book has ever made such an impression on me. It is one of my most precious possessions and I have returned to it again and again, each time finding new insight or depth. Here are a couple of my favorite passages;

“Left alone, I am overtaken by the northern void-no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue. In the early light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and dark is the power of the universe. This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning than a gust of snow; such transience and insignificance are exalting, terrifying, all at once…Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one’s own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound.”
― Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

“My foot slips on a narrow ledge; in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us…the present moment. The purpose of mediation practice is not enlightenment’ it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.”
― Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

Source of Photo; www.ayearofbeinghere.com

Peter Matthiessen died on April 5th 2014 age 86 of leukemia. I hope my daughter benefits from the wisdom and insight contained within these two books as much as I have.

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