A Fresh Path Despite the Brush, the Mud, and the Thorns

On New Year's Day we cleared a new path.

Literally.

It seemed like the right way to spend this morning of new beginnings.  Indeed, a biblical way, if the prophet Isaiah has it right.

When we purchased the property we would name "Taproot Garden", now well-over 8 years ago, we discovered a path on the eastern edge of our property that led to a clearing with an old fire pit in disrepair.  Perhaps our predecessors - or their children - had camped in the near, but secluded, space.  It has ever since been a beckoning mystery - evocative in its remove - save for one limitation.  The path went nowhere, except to the clearing.  There, the way reached a dead end, with little alternative but to turn around and retrace your steps.  We have dreamed of extending the path to connect with the prairie trail, but the woods are thick and brushy, and the challenge of hacking our way through the trees and the brush perennially dissuaded us.  The dead end has endured...

...provoking;
teasing;
beckoning.

Meanwhile, circumstances changed.  When we moved to this land we inherited a path around the western edge of the field that was to become the native prairie.  The grassy, tended way commenced just beyond our lawn, extended west toward the brushy expanse of the undeveloped property adjacent to us, before bending north toward the woods at the back of our property, eventually turning back eastward at the tree line and then south again toward the house.  The circle occasioned bucolic strolls - on foot during the warmer seasons, and on snow shoes during the whiter months.  Nestled now in the space between woods and tall grass, the way invited a slower, more observant pace while watching for butterflies and birds, noticing animal prints and emerging colors, and breathing deeper.  Eyes seemed sharper, noses more discerning, ears more alert around that path.  The very air seemed to crackle with wonder and intrigue.  More than one apathetic child has stepped onto that path with pronounced disinterest, only to complete the circuit with wide eyes and uninterruptible chatter about the sights and scents and sounds.

The only problem, confirmed by the recent sale of that undeveloped neighboring land, was that this western leg of the surrounding trail is not on our land.  Before, it never really mattered.  Now, of course, it did.

It was easy enough to mow a new path on our side of the line, deeper into the prairie, to replace the section that was lost.  But it abbreviated the walk.  Less an expansive circle, the trail now became a narrow rectangle - less a "way around," and more of a movement "out and back."  Our thoughts were drawn again to that dead end on the other side.

Could we add a new way - through the woods; creating a new linkage, yes, but also adding a new ambiance; a different experience?  The way through, after all, would be hilly - more topographically diverse; in the very midst of trees, before breaking out once more into the grassy lane.  A few days before, wielding a pair of loppers, we picked and stepped and pruned our way along a promising, hypothetical path.  "This could work," we heard ourselves saying, until the way was blocked by a massive grove of multiflora rose - a thorny morass of prickly shoots and vines perhaps 10-feet square, growing in our way.  We had lost track of where we were, and our enthusiasm suddenly felt a sharp deflation, as if pricked by one of those thorns.  And then one of us looked beyond the Medusa-like obstruction and exclaimed, "I see prairie grass just on the other side."

And so it came to pass a few days later, that on New Year's Day we fisted once again the trusty loppers, gassed up and roared the brush mower into life, and actualized the dream.  We cut, we mowed, we got stuck in the mud of the bisecting spring we didn't even know was there, but which only adds a feature of interest.  Eventually, even the thorny morass was nothing more than wood chips paving the threshold from one section of the Way, into a new.  We are already dreaming of the rekindled fires in that old, decrepit pit - perhaps some logs and stumps surrounding it for seating; and a whole new reason to go and come...and, perchance, to pause between the two.

And to wonder what other paths might emerge in this year just beginning, never mind the brush, the mud, and the thorns that obscure them?