On the Path, Off the Trail

How long have human beings been walking these trails? That was the first question that arose for me as I stood gazing out at a serpentine path—one of the old Inca trails—winding its way up into the puna of Northwest Argentina. It was chilling to see it, to feel the sudden collapse of past and present, the vivid sense of the past in the present. Many of the old trails have been destroyed or lost. But traces of them can still be found in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Peru. And some are still in use today. The one I was looking at near Tilcara in Jujuy province is the site of an annual Easter pilgrimage, torches lining the way in the pre-dawn darkness as pilgrims slowly ascend higher and higher into the mountains, hoping to reach the top by sunrise. A hallowed, though relatively recent, tradition laid down on top of much older practices. Still, the trail remains. And the impulse to walk it, to move from here to there, whether born of economic necessity or spiritual longing, remains.

I found myself thinking that day of other trails I had walked or seen or dreamed—the narrow path along the cliff-top above Needle Rock in the Sinkyone Wilderness, which I have walked every summer for the past twenty years, sometimes alone, often with my children, and almost always accompanied by cormorants, gulls and pelicans; also the scraggly, overgrown path in the abandoned field across from my child-hood home in the Pacific Northwest, which became, for my younger brother and me, a way into a world of mischief and wonderment. I recalled the strange ankle-to waist-deep trails of Tsankawi near Santa Fe, New Mexico, formed by countless footsteps gradually wearing away the soft chalky white tuff over many years. Also the path forged by the Japanese poet Basho, who set out in his old age on a five month journey along the “narrow road to the north,” maintaining a daily practice of paying attention and composing simple haiku in response to the landscape through which he walked. And the labyrinthine paths that have for centuries led monks and pilgrims, often with unexpected detours and dead-ends, toward one or another of the hidden monasteries of Mt. Athos.

The impulse to walk is so strong in us. Perhaps because of this, it has proven a durable and useful metaphor for spiritual longing. At the very beginning of Christianity is the central image of a path: the hodos or “way”; a key to understanding both the identity of Christ (“I am the Way”) as well as the life of faith itself. The image of walking or journeying would remain central to the Christian imagination. Not only among those who took up pilgrimages, to Jerusalem or Santiago de Compostela or Canterbury. But also for those who envisioned the encounter with God in prayer as a kind of path or journey: the long, difficult passage through the darkness of the desert envisioned by Gregory of Nyssa in his Life of Moses; Bonaventure’s elaborate and subtle Itinerarium: The Mind’s Journey into God; John of the Cross’s intense journey of purgation outlined in his Ascent of Mount Carmel; Teresa of Avila’s long descent into union with the divine in her Interior Castle. There is a recurring sense here that the imagery of walking, of following a path, traveling along a route both familiar and strange, is somehow essential to our capacity to grasp the meaning of spiritual experience; perhaps even to our capacity to open ourselves to it in the first place.

Still, such paths are rarely simple or straightforward. You walk, but not always with an awareness of where you are going. There is a sense of purpose; but also freedom and spontaneity, a deep sense of purposelessness, even wild abandon. You are “on the path, but off the trail.” This is how poet Gary Snyder captures the deep ambiguity of this kind of walking. Spiritual practice means staying “on the path,” maintaining the discipline and integrity of your practice. But it also...