I wonder if we could think of our lives as journeys in soul-growth. Then, more than ever, it seems right to understand that the destination is not as important as the journey. Every step counts and yes, so does every step we don’t take. It all counts.
Phrases posted on Facebook, September 2026
Here’s a deep truth from Thomas Merton’s The Road to Joy: “Our real journey in life is interior. It is a matter of growth, deepening, and an even greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts.”
Here’s wisdom from fellow traveler, Andrew Kopkind: “To be on a journey is to love your life enough to change it, to choose struggle instead of exile, to risk everything with only the glimmering you are on the right path.”
Mark Nepo always has wise things to tell us. “To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.”
I love this poem by Wendell Berry. It takes my breath away. I can’t format it as he has it, but the words are all there. “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.” For me that last phrase is famulous.
Here’s something from Martin Buber in Tales of the Hasidim: “All journeys have a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware.”
This is a famous one from J.R.R.Tolkien. If we are wondering and wandering it’s good to know. “Not all those who wander are lost.”
One of my absolute favorite authors is Abraham Joshua Heschel. This is what he says about faith and the journey it entails. “Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.”
Lillian Smith tells us something of her experience: “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.”
We know these words from Aurobindo intimately: “The spiritual journey is one of continually falling on your face, getting up, brushing yourself off, looking sheepishly at God and taking another step.”
Katherine Neville tells us, “Whether we know it or not, you were born to have a rendezvous with destiny; your journey toward it has already begun. But my people make a distinction between destiny and fate. We don’t think we are born with a “fate” that impels us to act out some script composed by a higher hand, but rather that each of us has a destiny, a preexisting pattern which, in our hearts we wish one day to fulfill.”
I find the following journey quote very poignant. “How do we find the way if we can’t see around the bend? . . . In our time of disturbance and radical change, we are crossing a threshold, a portal, or an unseen bridge from one world to another. It could be said that the bridge is either collapsing beneath us, or being made as we walk together.” Marie Haugen
J. Lash in “On Pilgrimage “shares, “I was beginning to realize that you must come slowly to a place, wait a little before feverishly resorting to guidebooks . . . Place has a mighty tongue of its own.” Surely this kind of coming to a place needs to happen often in our journeys.
Referring to the previous quote, aren’t we always coming to a place called NOW and having to leave it for the next NOW? I think it is in honoring where we find ourselves that makes it possible to go deeply into our journeys.
In the old days and perhaps also now, people are journeymen or journey-women learning a trade. I think we are all journey-people as we mature and make decisions about how to live in meaningful ways. Life itself turns out to be our mentor, and there will no doubt be some bumps along the way. There’s just no “right way”, just trial and error and many hilarious moments mixed in.
Here’s the last quote for our topic on Journeys. It’s from a part or an unpublished poem of mine. “My house has become a pilgrimage in silence. You know don’t you, that with enough stillness there is no place you can’t go.”
