Journeys of Simplicity : Traveling Light with Thomas Merton, Basho, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard & Others

You are invited to consider a more graceful way of travelling through life. With arresting clarity, this slim spiritual companion offers vignettes of forty travellers and the few, ordinary things they carried with them - from place to place, from day to day, from birth to death. What Thoreau took to Walden Pond. What Thomas Merton packed for his final trip to Asia. What Annie Dillard keeps in her writing tent. What Edward Abbey and a friend packed (and forgot to pack) for a float trip down the Colorado River. What an impoverished cook served M. F. K. Fisher for dinner. Gandhi's possessions at the time of his death. These vignettes create a spare poetry, a meditation on unencumbered living. In its own quiet way, this book ponders the light by which we travel, the light that guides our way - our travelling light. Not a 'simple living' book, reciting tips for how to pinch pennies or get rid of clutter, but a book to be savoured slowly, to remind us what is truly essential.