The Way Home Quotes

“Sitting by the rocket stove in the fire-hut, tending to a brew, I put the finishing touches to a soup spoon. It’s not perfect, yet every imperfection tells a story of my afternoon, which makes it perfect to me, and me only. When I eat soup from this day forth, that small dent in the bottom will be my Buddha, but I’m content with it. There’s no point being otherwise.”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“If there is a danger in the human trajectory it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfilment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“As I walk I’m usually searching for something: berries, leaves, clarity, or lessons from the beings we are forgetting how to listen to.”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“They say that if you feel you don’t have fifteen minutes to meditate each day, then you need to do an hour.”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“Whereas in January I was spending as much on stamps as I had previously done on a mobile phone, now I’m only spending a fraction of it. It’s an odd mix of feeling forgotten on one hand and, on the other, feeling liberated from relentless communication with people who, in all likelihood, live too far away for our relationship to deepen.”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up . . . we may never need read of another. One is enough.”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“They say that if you feel you don’t have fifteen minutes to meditate each day, then you need to do an hour. I’m sure it would do me no harm at all, but I’ve never been much of a man for sitting cross-legged, focusing on my breath. Instead, I prefer to whittle. Whittling is a form of practical meditation, which pre-dates the Buddhist and Hindu civilisations. It’s as simple as it gets. To make a tablespoon you take a branch – I prefer green birch, but holly, beech, maple and cherry can work well. Avoid softwoods. Saw it to length, axe it in half, draw out the shape of the spoon you’re aiming for, and start whittling it away with a small carving knife. Your knife, along with your sense of awareness, needs to be sharp. Drift away in your thoughts, worries or daydreams for one moment and, if you’re lucky, you’ll shave off a sliver of wood that may take you twenty minutes to correct; in the final stages you may not be able to correct it at all. If you’re unlucky, you may shave off a sliver of flesh from your finger that may take a week or two to correct itself. Nothing focuses the mind better than blood, or the thought of showing the woman you love an ugly, impractical spoon.”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“I once read that ‘love is the recognition of beauty’. I saw many beautiful qualities in her. She was kind, playful, thoughtful, generous. She stood up for the people and things she cared about. But I have never encountered alongside such honesty before. And I felt blessed to have met her.”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“Aldo Leopold once wrote that one of the ‘spiritual dangers’ of not spending time on a small farm was that you may ‘suppose that breakfast comes from the grocery’. In order to avoid such danger, he said, ‘one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue’.”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“Even back then I found that odd. How could I claim to understand economics when I knew nothing of the natural world on which all economies ultimately depend?”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“Human Scale”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“Then one day, out of nowhere, the now commonplace Thermos flask arrived in Knockmoyle. Very handy, Tommy says, and everyone wanted one. Within a short space of time families began boiling up their hot water on the range in their homes, before taking it with them to the bog. After millennia of honest service, the campfire was now obsolete. It probably saved a fair bit of time, I say to Tommy half-heartedly. Aye, Tommy replies, no one had to go looking behind bushes for their wheelbarrow first thing in the morning.”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“The Hidden Life of Trees,”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

“While I’m out working with Tommy Quinn, we get chatting about a session, a few nights previous, in a local pub called The Hill. It gets its name from the plain fact that it sits on top of a hill. The conversation moves on to the state of rural Ireland, and rural everywhere for that matter. He’s lived here in Knockmoyle for all of his life, so his opinions on the subject hold weight with me. He asks me what technology I think had the most dramatic impact on life here when he was growing up. I state what I feel are obvious: the television, the motor car and computers. Or electricity in general. Tommy smiles. The flask, he says. I ask him to explain. When he was growing up in the 1960s, he and his family would go to the bog, along with most of the other families of the parish, to cut turf for fuel for the following winter. They would all help each other out in any way they could, even if they didn’t always fully get on. Cutting turf in the old ways, using a sleán, is hard but convivial work, so each day one family would make a campfire to boil the kettle on. But the campfire had a more significant role than just hydrating the workers. As well as keeping the midges away, it was a focal point that brought folk together during important seasonal events. During the day people would have the craic around it as the tea brewed, and in the evenings food would be cooked on it. By nightfall, with the day’s work behind them, the campfire became the place where music, song and dance would spontaneously happen. Before the night was out, one of the old boys would hide one of the young lads’ wheelbarrows, providing no end of banter the following morning.”
― Mark Boyle, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology