Does the phrase “It’s all downhill from here” mean “It all gets worse from here” or “From here everything gets easier”? I suppose it depends on where the coast downhill will land you, and you can never be sure of that until you have finally arrived.
What in your life is on a downhill coast?
“A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
When have you awakened to a stranger within yourself?
While drivers are dashing back and forth across the bridge, fixed on where they need to go and what they need to do, who is traveling the bridge that is in the water, that wavering image that goes, not over the depths, but through them?
In the busyness of daily life, what helps you to go deep?
Do you remember climbing a tree—perhaps a favorite tree from your childhood? Can you feel the bark against your skin, the tension of grappling for a hold, the relaxation of settling into the most comfortable crook?
What particular tree is precious to you in memory or in your present?
“Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature—if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you—know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.”
–Henry David Thoreau
What aspect of spring awakens you and allows you to feel your pulse?
