Quotes from Jason Wilson

They talk of my drinking but never my thirst. - Scottish proverb

Once you're several generations removed from your cultural heritage, how much connection is truly possible? Bits and pieces might be integrated into home life—a cultural event here, some ethnic food there—but for the most part the upbringing is American.

Not at Lehman Brothers, which collapsed in 2008, and not on Wall Street; Greece was where the fire broke out. One heard the word contamination again and again, but this time it was no imperial cultural contamination, no creeping process of civilization. This time the crisis was a contagion: debts and obligations that would never be repaid, a gradual deterioration of the financial immune system.

tips. Yet at its most ideal, the worth of the genre lies in exploring the tensions of our interior journey vs. our exterior itinerary, in examining our expectations (and hopes and biases) of a destination vs. the reality of what we found, and in measuring the person we are at home vs. the person we become abroad.

Will I be able to spare my heart while dissecting memories of the past?

Maybe—like what the guard said at the gate of the Sun Street—I should not pry open the bleeding wounds of the past. Maybe I should just try to keep my good old memories.

The beauty of good writing is that it transports the reader inside another person's experience in some other physical place and culture and, at its best, evokes a palpable feeling of being in a specific moment in time and space.

After vacancy has dusted off the cobwebs of our unsettled recollections, we reach out one more time

Holding on to offenses emotionally incarcerates us, but forgiveness is a key that liberates.

Together, all four now subscribed to a set of teachings that boiled down to "the law of nonresistance," as they described it—fundamentally, making the best of the current moment.

Putting it simply, my brother had a hotline to Heaven. When he dropped a contact lens on the bathroom floor, instead of crawling on hands and knees, anxious to find it, he just closed his eyes, prayed for a minute, then looked down and it would be there. Nothing was his battle. Any struggle, no matter the size, belonged to his Friend. Sinclair knew the power of Yahushua.

There's just something irresistible about hope.

Aggressively yelling at a boy is as effective as attempting to stitch up a wound with a needle and no suture. Discipline without love is ineffectual.

Try something new. Try something strange. Expose yourself to flavors you've never considered before. Taste something - anything - that makes you stop for a moment and pay attention and experience.

Something in djet time is finished but not past; it exists forever in the present.

That perhaps I could walk my way to reclaiming enough of an illusion of safety to survive the next four years in this country.

I don't think I verbalized it to anyone, including myself, but I knew then that I wanted to be a perpetual traveler. I was happiest receiving and experiencing new information about the world, in situ.

But part of education of travel lies in seeing things with fresh and ignorant eyes -- and in being wrong. Which is why it's important to check in with that younger traveler from time to time, to retrace the journeys that remain vivid in my mind, to ask new questions of where I've gone before.

What gives value to travel is fear.

The pause we're experiencing can highlight a basic truth: we may or may not walk this way again, and even if we do, we will never be precisely the same people who experienced that journey in the first place. Travel is only ever about a moment in time and space, but it's also about how we choose to hold that moment in our memories. It is always both present and past.

My body wasn't something to be starved or cut or filled with booze until I blacked out; it was something to be taken care of.

Pleasure demands presence. It invites you to inhabit your body more fully; no part of you is held at remote.

There can be a radical honesty to pleasure, a profound nakedness in surrendering fully to the unguarded, unselfconscious states of enjoyment. It's harder to hide or dissimulate when you're enjoying yourself.

Restoring what has broken is a reminder to be careful with that is here now.