{"id":17122,"date":"2015-08-21T11:53:02","date_gmt":"2015-08-21T15:53:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=17122"},"modified":"2015-08-21T11:53:02","modified_gmt":"2015-08-21T15:53:02","slug":"caminante-no-hay-camino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2015\/08\/caminante-no-hay-camino\/","title":{"rendered":"Caminante, No Hay Camino<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"'Those<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image: “Those footsteps, deep into the silence,” by Aurelio Aslain (user “ionushi”) on Flickr<\/a>. (Used under a Creative Commons license.) Aslain exhibited this photo with a poem reproduced below.]<\/em><\/p>\n

From whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, swinging from behind. Heel touches down. The whole weight of the body rolls forward onto the ball of the foot. The big toe pushes off, and the delicately balanced weight of the body shifts again. The legs reverse position. It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.<\/p>\n

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.<\/p>\n

Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.<\/p>\n

The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making. And so one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete — for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Rebecca Solnit [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

Until Even the Angels<\/strong><\/p>\n

What the heart wants
\nis to follow its true passion,
\nto lie down with it
\nnear the reeds beside
\nthe river,
\nto devour it in the caves
\nbetween the desert dunes,
\nto sing its notes
\ninto the morning sky
\nuntil even the angels
\nwake up
\nand take notice
\nand look around
\nfor their beloved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Dorothy Walters [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n
Alumbramiento<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Atr\u00e1s la casa,
\nnoche adentro mis pasos,
\nsus rezagados<\/em><\/p>\n

ecos. Silencio, al alba,
\nde la nieve cayendo.<\/em><\/td>\n

Birth of Light<\/strong><\/p>\n

The house left behind,
\nfootsteps deep into the night,
\nthese echoes fallen<\/p>\n

behind. Silence, at dawn,
\nof the falling snow.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

(Aurelio Aslain [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

Poem after a walk in the woods<\/strong><\/p>\n

I went for a walk in the woods alone at sunset
\nwith my dog
\nand the earthquake in Haiti
\nand the health care bill passed by the senate
\nand a great horned owl
\nand at least 3 hunters in the surrounding hills
\napparently trying to set some kind of a record for ammunition wasted in a one hour period<\/p>\n

my feelings about the hunters
\nwere different than my feelings about the owl
\nthough a vole or a mouse might have felt
\nthat the threat in the sounds they made
\nwas pretty similar<\/p>\n

and I enumerated in my mind the 4, or was it five, basic goals of the health
\ncare bill passed by the senate, and left it to rest somewhere in the muddy
\nfootprint left by a moose<\/p>\n

and for awhile I walked with the ghosts of the people killed in the earthquake in Haiti
\nhundreds of thousands of them, covered with plaster dust
\npossibly more than the total number of people killed in the Iraq war
\nand thought of Pat Robertson, who said, and I paraphrase,
\nthat the Haitians had made a pact with the devil and he was taking his due,
\nand this comment showed an unprecedented sense of poetry
\nbecause how could something so overwhelmingly sad and desperate
\ncome of something so mundane as the subduction of one plate of earth under another?
\nCertainly an injury this huge in the fabric of the universe
\nmust have been the result of divine intervention.<\/p>\n

And I walked with the millions of people who will, like T cells and macrophages and fibroblasts in the dark body of the earth, heal, but oh so excruciatingly slowly, this deep and bleeding laceration.<\/p>\n

and then I was just walking with my dog
\nwho was barking at the vole she had unearthed
\noverjoyed with this intimate interspecies interaction
\nand then performing brief and truly inadequate CPR with her nose<\/p>\n

and the owl again
\nand the hunters
\nand the sun setting through grey clouds on the stubble fields and forested hills
\nthe golden light
\non the half frozen ponds
\nof the place I walked
\nwhich lacked nothing
\nof perfection<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Janice Boughton [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n\n
Proverbios y cantares XXIX<\/strong><\/em><\/td>\nProverbs and Songs 29<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Caminante, son tus huellas
\nel camino, y nada m\u00e1s;
\ncaminante, no hay camino,
\nse hace camino al andar.
\nAl andar se hace camino,
\ny al volver la vista atr\u00e1s
\nse ve la senda que nunca
\nse ha de volver a pisar.
\nCaminante, no hay camino,
\nsino estelas en la mar.<\/em><\/td>\n		Wayfarer, the only way
\nIs your footprints and no other.
\nWayfarer, there is no way.
\nMake your way by going farther.
\nBy going farther, make your way
\nTill looking back at where you’ve wandered,
\nYou look back on that path you may
\nNot set foot on from now onward.
\nWayfarer, there is no way;
\nOnly wake-trails on the waters.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(Antonio Machado [source: various, English translation from here<\/a><\/em>])<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Image: “Those footsteps, deep into the silence,” by Aurelio Aslain (user “ionushi”) on Flickr. (Used under a Creative Commons license.) Aslain exhibited this photo with a poem reproduced below.] From whiskey river: Where does it start? Muscles tense. One leg a pillar, holding the body upright between the earth and sky. The other a pendulum, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,250,5,36,251],"tags":[2640,3884,4146,4147,4148,4149,4150],"class_list":{"0":"post-17122","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","8":"category-art","9":"category-06_writing","10":"category-reading","11":"category-poetry-writing_cat","12":"tag-antonio-machado","13":"tag-rebecca-solnit","14":"tag-aurelio-aslain","15":"tag-dorothy-walters","16":"tag-janice-boughton","17":"tag-walking","18":"tag-wandering","19":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-4sa","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17122"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17142,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17122\/revisions\/17142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}