The Ideal Journeying with Us
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you read Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays long ago or never had the opportunity to read them, you may have missed this gem of a passage.  It describes, metaphorically, the terrain of a glimpse into heightened awareness. What a phenomenally skillful travel guide Emerson is, reminding us that we understand our bearings little by little, that we must persist in order to see more clearly, and that a great joy awaits us and promises more and ever more, bringing our hearts alive.  Of all the gifts in life for which we are grateful, surely this inner perception ranks right near the top. 

It is worth noting that Emerson's five-year-old son Waldo died only two years before these words were written.  Often grief compels us to look more deeply into the nature of experience.
~ Patricia Carlson

"Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam. Do but observe the mode of our illumination. When I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as when, being thirsty, I drink water, or go to the fire, being cold: no! but I am at first apprised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals, and showed the approaching traveller the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze, and shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. I do not make it; I arrive there, and behold what was there already…. I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement, before the first opening to me of this august magnificence, old with the love and homage of innumerable ages, young with the life of life, the sunbright Mecca of the desert. And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty."