Justin: Hello my friend - good to read your post here at
I-I....
...
P.S. Can you tell me more about Antonio Machado....
Hi, Justin,
Antonio Machado is a recent "discovery" of mine --- less than a
month. He is a Castillan poet of the last century. The line that I quoted in my
signature file is an answer to a quest that I was in during the last few weeks
before I "discovered" him.
It is from a poem called Proverbios y Cantares (Proverbs and Songs) which is
part of a published collection of poems called Campos de Castilla (Fields of
Castilla). (See Border
of a Dream : Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, an amazon.com
link. I like this translation better than any others that are
available. There are more collected poems for the buck in this
book. Besides, it is bi-lingual. It helps me in my study of
Spanish.)
During this personal quest that I was in a few weeks ago, something totally
unrelated to the news item that was on TV caught my eye. I was not paying
much attention to the news item but when I glanced up to the TV screen, I saw
the phrase "You make the road as you walk" below the name of someone
who was being interviewed. I thought it was a song title. I was
intrigued and went on line to find out more about "this song".
I was sorting through the haystack of my Yahoo! search result pages when I came
across an article written by a certain Rodolfo Carrasco. All his life, he
was in search of "someone to come and give me a vision" and
"tell me what to do" when one day he came across Machado's poem while
he was high on a mountain in Puebla, Mexico. The poem's line that snapped
him out of his lethargy ("My soul was on hold." as he put it.) is the
following:
"Caminante, no hay
camino, se hace camino al andar..."
["Sojourner there is no road/You make the road as you walk."]
(http://www.urbanonramps.com/rc/parenting.html).
(NOTE: Rodolfo Carrasco's article mis-stated the poem's origin as Mexican).
I was on a similar search for guidance. Reading his story allowed me to
comprehend the weight of the words of the poem. It really hit the mark of
my quest. The uncertainty and hesitation simply vanished. Whatever heaviness
there was on my shoulders, it lifted up on that moment of enlightenment.
The meaning of the poem that was conveyed to my consciousness also reminded of
something that I had read not too long ago. I saw in it what the first chapter
of the Tao Te Ching was telling me (as I understood it to be from the original
Chinese, and, of course, with the help other translations that I have close
by):
道可道,非恆道。
[The Dao that can be perceived, is not the eternal Dao]
…
故, 常: 無欲 以觀其妙; 常, 有欲 以觀其徼。
(NOTE:
This line's translation is my own. Others may have translated this line
differently depending on where they put the commas and which characters were
grouped together.)
[Therefore, the eternal (Dao):
...(when one is) void of deep-seated desires, is revealed in its essence or
true nature;
...(when one is) filled with attachments, is perceived as mere empty form.]
老子 道德經 - Lao Zi's -Dao De Jing -
(This Tao Te Ching quote is actually a continuation
of the Machado quote in my complete signature file; however, the signature
space allocation in this forum is not enough to accomodate the text. Calling the attention of the system admin).
I was so "attached" to the "deep-seated desire" on getting
it right that I did not see the Way.
I will be holding on to the Machado line (... you make the road as you walk...)
and the Tao Te Ching translation for quite sometime as I move forward and pave
the road before me.
towers1209
杜 偉 德
-------------------
"Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar..."
[Traveller, there is no path, you create the path as you move forward...]
Antonio Machado (1875-1939)