Enjoying the rabbit trails
The forest | Photo by Jonathan Blundell
There’s a beautiful picture Wendell Berry paints in the first chapter of his book, The Art of the Commonplace.
He talks about returning to the place of his birth and discovering a small trail that runs alongside a nearby river.
The trail is simple. It winds around the trees and alongside the river. Always going around obstacles, rather than pushing through them.
He then compares it to a nearby roadway. A roadway that was once a path for wagons and is now a path for vehicles travelling to and fro.
In comparison to the simple trail, the roadway is meant for one thing — get from point A to point B in the fastest route possible — even if that means blasting through a hill that has stood for generations, or plowing down a grove of trees — the road must plow through.
The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to a place; it obeys the natural contours; such as obstacles as it meets it goes around. A road, on the other hand, even the most primitive road, embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape; it seeks so far as to possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we clearly see in the example of our modern freeways, is to be a bridge; its tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort.
Even in our modern roadway systems, we can find further examples of this concept.
Over the weekend my wife and I traveled to College Station for my cousin’s wedding. Naturally our GPS unit took us on the most direct route possible.
But through a bit of confusion (or lack of trust in the system) I chose to follow the posted road signs instead of the GPS. It ended up turning into a nice sidetrack through downtown Madisonville, Texas that we would have otherwise missed if we had taken the suggested route.
As I read and think about Berry’s comparison it caused me to reflect on my attitudes towards the scenery and life growing up around me.
Am I simply rushing from point A to point B? Or am I taking the time to slow down and enjoy the things around me?
Am I plowing through life (and people) simply to get where I want to be? Or am I taking time to treasure those things that have stood the test of time?
It’s so easy to see the value in bypassing all the distractions (and small towns) around us — after all, we’re being more efficient aren’t we?
But think about all those wonderful joys we may miss as well.
Let’s all take time this week to slow down and follow the rabbit trails in your life — and then share with us what you find…
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