A holy day, after all, is a day for considering everything you otherwise think too little about.

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.

For more and more of us, home has less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.

Gandhi or Bishop Tutu or the Dalai Lama. I think they're really embodiments of what we aspire to and, by keeping them in our heads, we're reminding ourselves of who we could be. That's what we're hoping to climb up towards.

The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing.

We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.