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Caminante

 

--Antonio Machado

 

Caminante, son tus huellas el camino, y nada más;

caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.

Al andar se hace camino, y al volver la vista atrás,

se ve la senda que nunca se ha de volver a pisar.

Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la mar.

 

Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more;

 

wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking.

 

By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing back one sees the path that will never be trod again.

 

Wanderer, there is no road— Only wakes upon the sea.

 

Source: "Proverbios y cantares XXIX" [Proverbs and Songs 29], Campos de Castilla (1912); trans. Betty Jean Craige in Selected Poems of Antonio Machado

(Louisiana State University Press, 1979)

 

Another Translation

 

Traveler, your footprint is your path and nothing else; 
Traveler, there is no way, the way is made by going. 
By walking you make the path, and when you look back, 
You see the track where you should never walk again. 
Traveler, there is no way, only the wake in the sea.

 

Variation on the Theme

 

Crawling

 

 —Gary Snyder

 

“We usually visualize an excursion into the wild as an exercise of walking upright. We imagine ourselves striding through open alpine terrain, or across the sublime space of a sagebrush basin, or though the somber understory of an ancient sugar pine grove . . . To go where bears, deer, raccoons, foxes —all our other neighbors go – you have to be willing to crawl. So we began to overcome our hominid pride and learned to take pleasure in turning off the trail to go directly into the brush to find the contours and creatures of the pathless part of the woods. Not really pathless, for there is the whole world of little animal trails that have their own logic. You go down, crawl swift along, spot an opening, stand and walk a few yards, and go down again. The trick is: have no attachment to standing, find your body at home on the ground, be a quadruped, or, if necessary, a snake.”

 

Source: Not Turning Away: The Practice of Engaged Buddhism, edited by Susan Moon (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2004).

 

 

 

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Trail Ridge Road

Rocky Mountain National Park

August, 2013

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