Tag: Robert Frost

Paths not taken (Richmond Park)

The cold sun cheers the soul and the hard ground make good terrain for running, so I was off for a long and steady run round Richmond Park yesterday, with the jackdaws and rooks and jays all busy, and many people walking and chatting, and the occasional too fast cyclist on the Tamsin Trail, and all those wonderful tracks, it felt like thousands of them, made by man and deer, scooting off among the long tufty grass and the dead bracken and bog.

And all those quiet places too, where the tracks take the deer and rarely take us humans, though mad runners like the wilder ways.

Several times I stopped and wondered which path to take, each time a path not taken, and in Robert Frost’s words, that could have made all the difference. Each turn dictates all later turns, and along each path different thoughts, and different times for getting back to the carpark, and getting back home – and for lunch. And every other junction, another decision, and in one, and in every, instant, your life can – and will – change. Avoid any notions of permanence! We are all creatures of serendipity. So keep your mind empty – something I’m very bad at doing (one reason why I meditate!) – let the dao take you where it will, and best to ride it, and not seek to break the flow.

The Camino and the poem

I didn’t carry a book of poems with me on the Camino. I thought about it. But I wanted all my responses to be my own, and not guided by the insights of others. Now I’m back, and I’m reading, and writing.

Antonio Machado has a reminder of another way of walking:

I have walked many roads, / I have found many paths; / I have sailed a hundred seas, / and landed on a hundred shores…

And in all places I have seen/ people who dance and play, / when they can, and work / their four spans of land.

Never when they come to a place / do they ask where to go. / When they make their way, they ride / on the back of an old mule / and do not know to hurry /not even on the days of the fiesta…

We’re privileged to walk the Camino. Countless others have travelled before us, and they’ve travelled wisely, and slowly. (Walking slowly is something I’m not always too good at, as my Camino friends will testify!)

Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken reminds us of chance and serendipity:

…Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the road less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference.

There is of course only one route westward (and a few diversions) on the Camino. But is there? Depending on when you start, the month, the season, the weather, the clouds, the shadows – there are a thousand routes.

Rudyard Kipling’s The Way through the Woods catches the sense of those who’ve travelled a path before us:

…Yet, if you enter the woods / Of a summer evening late… / You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet, / and the swish of a skirt in the dew / Steadily cantering through / The misty solitudes

This is a corner of England, not Spain, and it’s woodland, and the path is no more… but the resonance is still there. And that sense of impermanence: the Camino hasn’t always been there, and won’t always be there.  We are our own moment in time.

I was always conscious on the Camino of those who’d walked before me, maybe a thousand years ago. St James never walked the way, but as Santiago Matamoros he led the Spanish army against the Moors, so legend would have it. He could also be my companion, and to see what I mean by that check out another post, with two poems of my own, under the heading ‘Shadow – four poems’.

On another tack, there’s Pablo Neruda:

And that’s why I have to go back / to so many places in the future / there to find myself… / with no task but to live / with no family but the road

I love Neruda but there’s a Rilke poem I can’t find that captures the idea of the future, of a light ahead we never reach, even  better.

[Rilke poem, The Walk, now found, thanks to my friend, Sarah, my companion for three days on the Camino.

Already my eyes touch the sunlit hill/Far ahead of the road I have just begun/ So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;/We see its light even from a distance –

And it changes us, even if we do not reach it,/Into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;/A gesture seems to wave us on, answering our own wave,/But what we feel is the wind in our faces.]

Finally, another, and famous, Machado:

Walker, your footsteps / are the road, and nothing more.

Walker, there is no road, / the road is made by walking.

Walking you make the road, / and turning to look behind / you see the path you never / again will step upon.

Walker there is no road, / only foam trails on the seas.

We experience highs and the lows, joys and sorrows, we walk in company and alone, we laugh and we keep silence. There’s a poem somewhere which captures every mood.

Or almost does, which is why we keep writing our own poems. No-one quite captures a moment or a mood as we do ourselves. We only need the pen, and the silence.