off the path: Bokondini. And Books.

Not sure it gets much better than this. A simple cottage in the mountains, rain on the roof to rhythm you to sleep at night, bacon breakfasts on the wood stove, stream fed micro-hydro electricity 15 hours a day...and shelves full of books. The three of us are just finishing up a great break in Bokondini (central highlands of Papua.)

Too much rain clogs the hydro inlet with debris...
and gives us an excuse to have a candlelit dinner.

Speaking of books, here are ten I read in past year that were particularly good. In no specific order:

Paul Miller: A Praying Life.

Learned desperation is at the heart of a praying life.

The eminently quotable G.K. Chesterton makes my list three times. All three classics are well worth reading, and the Kindle versions are free.

Orthodoxy

There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints

have said with a sort of savage monotony.

They have said simply that to be rich
is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck.

If our faith comments on government at all, its comment must be this:

that the man should rule who does NOT think he can rule.

...the more I considered Christianity,

the more I found that while it had established a rule and order,

the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

Mysticism keeps men sane.

As long as you have mystery you have health;

when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

The ordinary man has always been sane

because the ordinary man has always been a mystic.

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens.

It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head.

And it is his head that splits.

All Things Considered

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

In the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill;

whether we fought with flails or reeds.

It will matter to us greatly on which side we fought.

Heretics

But in order that life should be a story or romance to us,

it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate,

should be settled for us without our permission.

Exactly at the instance when hope ceases to be reasonable

it begins to be useful.

Maurice Herzog: Annapurna

A mountaineering classic that inspired a generation of mountain climbers. This is one of the few tales of the modern era that deservedly brushes up against the label epic. In 1950 Herzog and his team first had to find Annapurna before they could climb it...and in doing so be the first humans to stand on a peak higher than 8000 meters.

In my worst moments of anguish,

I seemed to discover the deep significance of existence

of which till then I had been unaware.

I saw that it was better to be true than to be strong.

Ed Viesturs: No Shortcuts to the Top

Viesturs was the first American to summit all 14 peaks higher than 8000 meters. I found it fascinating that his success (and survival--the mountains claimed many of his colleague's lives along the way) was due in large part to the number of times he turned back--often within sight of the summit. This came from his unyielding adherence to his philosophy of mountain climbing:

Reaching the summit is optional.

Getting down is mandatory.

This struck me as so central to how we achieve safety in the unforgiving environment of flying light aircraft in Papua that we've pilfered Viestur's motto, modified it, and adopted it as a flight department:

Completing the mission is optional.

A safe landing is mandatory.

Dallas Willard: Hearing God