Heal the Paths

 

England is a continuous map of paths, and they have been vital to the emergence of human settlement and civilization. Paths are the bloodways through where humans have hunted, traded, exchanged stories and time. They were also where our world met with Earth along the way, and for the journey on the path we would be marking a point in time when we would be observing not the hearth-centre of the home and sound of human activity around us, but the sun, the sky, water, animals and plants. But in these stainless steel modern times, how we have lost such paths! As once in our everyday lives we were able leave behind the fuss of humanity, and enter the peace of Earths green girdle.

Today's technology oppresses, stifles, blocks off the experience of walking those old paths. Cars dominate travel, and legs are no longer obligatory to move through space and time. Motorways cut through the landscape blind to its magic and undulations. Paths have fallen into disuse in the ebb and flow of human business. One important, and indeed intrinsic element of those paths that we once walked in a communal landscape was their nature of wandering. Wandering is another subject I will likely discourse and digress on later. But paths wandered because they had to yield to the curves in the land, and skirt around difficult terrain like marshes and woods full of robbers. Wandered because the paths were tracking the time of the land which went to the slower Earth-time that slowed us down. In the modern world it has become a sinful practise to go slow, to wander, and put aside the march of the money-counting clock. We are glowered upon as snails holding back progress of an aggressively materialist world if we dare to wander off! It is a tragedy that today man exists with a wall between him and Earth, for his paths no longer yield to the land, its vagaries, and that humbling bodily experience of knowing you cannot go any faster, nor further than what your own body can give, and you can give to your own body in the way of care and nourishment.

Its a cerebral traffic jam modern civilization is stuck in. The environments we are familiar with today supermarkets, carparks, sprawling housing suburbia and all the rest, are cerebral in their monotonous, rigid layouts. Cerebral in that their origins have come out of a human mind that is thinking in terms of abstract figures of money, designs and attitudes that when they are stamped out there for us to see, tell us how well this person understands using a computer and has never once thought of the Earth as more than a 'Click and drop here' exercise.

Such is the state of modern man's world I would call it a pathless one, for it dismisses the journey and its destination is a low-grade reality it grasps for, involving the production of tons of objects with which the consumers can fill up their boxy homes. For a lack of path, here man is adrift in a strange land that keeps everything that it entices him with hidden from his eyes. Globalisation, mass production lines, and corporate ownership are the great pillars of this theatre that vows to keep man from the wandering path. If he struck out on its road might take him on a rich journey those destination will shear asunder the false façade, horrifying and at once empowering him with the truth beneath its barbed cotton: we all have to find our way back to Mother Earth, because she is the source of all true prosperity, happiness, and freedom to be. But once somebody tries to control her gifts, and manipulate their purity they become darkened out of their selfishness changing into the very opposite of what they are. This feels like an appropriate place to stop at now and hand it over to the poetry.

Healing the Paths

Heal the paths,
that took us,
to meet worlds,
beyond ourselves,
and did not finish at the page in an empty box.

 Heal the paths,

that once took us,
to find ourselves,
at home among the growing trees,
learning again,
how to watch and listen by its sounds and signs.

 Heal the paths,

that once,
brought us to,
be nourished,
where the land,
once grew abundantly,
for itself.

Heal the paths,

that wended,
towards wild places,
where mind and body could be free,
to run, jump, get dirty and feel the warmth 
of being alive.

 Heal the paths,

that did meet between,
us and all the wriggling,
flowering and tangling things,
those own paths,
begin where ours end.

 Heal the paths.

Where else can we walk?
But on the Earth,
on a journey,
towards our heart,
taking the tracks
of animals, birds and insects,
who have always shown us,
the way home.

 Robin Collins 2013