Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road...

"...life may be much easier than the rest of us believe it is, that most of the things we worry about are not worth worrying about, that a low bank account or unfashionable clothes won't give you cancer. And this is precisely how it sometimes feels to me, that a low bank account or low social status will give me cancer.

I tend to think life is about security, that when you have a full year's rent, you can rest. I worry about things too much, I worry about whether or not my ideas are right, I worry about whether or not people like me, I worry about whether or not I am going to get married, and then I worry about whether or not my girl will leave me if I do get married. Lately I found myself worrying about whether or not my car was fashionable, whether I sounded like an idiot when I spoke in public, whether or not my hair was going to fall out, and all of it, perhaps, because I bought into Houston, one thousand square miles of concrete and strip malls and megachurches and cineplexes, none of it real.

...None of the messages are true or have anything to do with the fact we are spinning around on a planet in a galaxy set somewhere in a cosmos that doesn't have any edges to it. There doesn't seem to be any science saying any of this stuff matters at all. But it feels like it matters, whatever it is; it feels like we are supposed to be panicking about things.

...it hit me that, amid the screaming noise, amid the messages that said buy this product and I will be made complete, I could hardly know the life that life was meant to be...Nobody stops to question whether they actually need the house and the car and the better job. And because of this there doesn't seem to be any peace; there isn't any serenity.

...We drive around in a trance, salivating for Starbucks while that great heaven sits above us, and that beautiful sunrise is happening in the desert, and all those mountains out West are collecting snow on the limbs of their pines, and all those leaves are changing colours out East. God, it is so beautiful, it is so quiet, it is so perfect. It makes you feel, perhaps for a second, that Paul get its and we don't - that if you live in a van and get up for sunrise and cook your own food on a fire and stop caring about whether your car breaks down or whether you have fashionable clothes or whether or not people do or do not like you, that you have broken through, that you have shut your ear to the bombardment of lies, that never, ever stop whispering in your ear. And maybe this is why he seems so different to me, because he has become a human who no longer believes the commercials are true, which, perhaps, is what a human was designed to be.

...This is what we were made for, to watch the beauty of light fill up earth's canvas, to make dirt come alive; like fairy dust, making trees and cacti and humans from the magic of its propulsion.

...could the thing you and I were supposed to feel, the thing you and I were supposed to be, cost nothing?

...maybe when a person doesn't buy the lies anymore, when a human stops long enough to realize the stuff people say to get us to part with our money often isn't true, we can finally see the sunrise, smell the wetness in a Gulf breeze, stand in awe at a downpour no less magnificent than a twenty-thousand-foot waterfall, then square miles wide, wonder at the physics of a duck paddling itself across the surface of a pond, enjoy the reflection of the sun on the face of the moon, and know, This is what I was made to do. This is who I was made to be, that life is being given to me as a gift, that light is a metaphor, and God is doing these things to dazzle us."

-Donald Miller