"The land knows you, even when you are lost." — Robin Wall Kimmerer
A curving path — one that I cannot see the end of — is irresistible to me.
Have you ever noticed how a pathway feels alive? The turns and twists, rise and fall, seem a kind of drawing, a calling-on speech.
Follow, follow, the path whispers, setting the rhythm. And follow I must. One questing step after the other, a bewitched child in a fairytale.
With our wandering spirits we sense that a pathway is a liminal space...a space of transition from one place to another. A threshold between here and there.
We walk on, in a state of not-knowing. How far will the path will go? Where will it will take us? When we turn to look back, what will we see?
Again and again, I make images of paths, roads, ways. Why do they call to me, I wonder, what are they asking? I've not considered before the reason why this motif holds power. But what feels true is that they speak to us as messengers, from the imaginal realm, the unconscious — in the wordless soul language of archetype and symbolism.
A path reminds us that we are both physical and spiritual Travelers, Explorers and Wayfarers on this journey through life; that we are passing through, transient upon this earth.
Who can delimit the metaphorical path they are following in life? Or whether it will take them where they imagine they want to go?
Only in looking back can we begin to have even a hope of tracing the larger trajectory of our winding journey.
I keep thinking of The Fool tarot card. We set out into the unknown, to learn those lessons we need to learn.
For imprecise navigators such as I, there is something comforting about a clear and unambiguous path laid out before us. How can you go astray, as long as you keep to the path?
But on a deeper level, isn't that clarity an illusion? The reason we want to follow the path in the first place is because the mystery beckons to us...precisely because we do not know where it is heading. Nor is any path you step onto ever clear. Because any worthwhile path changes you, as you walk it.
We are like rivers, never carrying the same water (or self) twice.
The path is a spiral. We revisit the same places, emotions, challenges again and again — but changed. On each turn of the spiral, we bring with us subtle or profound shifts in our perceptions, our understanding, our experience.
We are in changing relationship to this path, and the relationship goes both ways...we also alter the path through our walking of it, in ways we cannot fully know. All is alive.
If I let my intuition speak to me of pathways, she says: "The path knows it is being walked, and it wishes for you to walk it."
The path recognizes you. It invites you on a journey through the inner and outer landscape. This path, this ground that your feet love walking upon, loves you back.
Walking, I look into the land around me like a mirror, like a book, like a map to myself. Who to be, how to be, where to walk next?
The land knows who you are, writes Robin Wall Kimmerer. Then perhaps also the path creates who we are? Will I recognize myself anew in its voice?
I offer a blessing for the path, and for those who walk it — The Travelers, Wayfinders, Seekers and Wanderers:
May you be lost ... and may you be found.
