Paths and Roads

Wendell Berry writes:

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 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 place; it obeys the natural contours; such 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 possible to go over the country, rather than through it; its aspiration, as we see clearly 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. It is destructive, seeking to remove or destroy all obstacles in its way.
(from “A Native Hill” in The Art of the Common Place)

This reminds me of the Tao. The meek person has relationships with people for their own sake, and humility prevents him from using those relationships as means to an end. He relates to persons as they are, and freely chooses submission; so, without striving, his will is always done. I think the path is a great model for relations with others and with circumstances.

For dealing with myself, though – striving with the passions and my own disordered ego and appetites – there “the kingdom suffers violence and the violent take it by force.” There is spiritual warfare, though not against the body or the thoughts – those aren’t the enemies, they’re the battlefield we contest to own. In this spiritual struggle, I’m happy to take shortcuts and remove obstacles, “for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” I think it was Elder Ephraim who succinctly said we need mercy toward everyone else and ruthlessness toward ourselves.

“I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the high call of God in Christ Jesus.”