The Way (3)

Dear Friends,

Above you'll see a strange sight that caught my eye as I was walking up East Rock in Great Barrington.  It is the print of someone's heel, but their footfall had somehow left the heelprint upright, so that it became a trail angel, perpendicular to the path.

We're still on the Way, and still with that poem by Antonio Machado (1875-1939), but today emphasizing a different line:
 

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.”

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.

This has a lot to do with the snow angel: the intersection of the timeless with time that Eliot wrote about.  For the emboldened repetition in Spanish uses a reflexive, impersonal verb both times.  A more literal but less idiomatic English translation would be:

path makes itself in walking.
In walking the path makes itself,
 

So we are walking, horizontally, as if it is our doing.  At the same time, each moment is potentially upright, an intersection point.  Our task today is to participate in this point of intersection, where our intention is no longer ours alone.

Gun violence, war, economic and climate exploitation: these come from the lack of any sense that the earth is a sacred and unitary arena. They are healed -- a little -- when anyone, in their apparently horizontal journey, reaches upward to the sources of existence.  We dedicate the inner merit of our collective activity in this direction.

with love,

Michael