The unseen path

So here we have two ideas: the wood and the path. The wood, or the forest if you like, is a wild space. It’s an unstructured space. It’s a space full of possibilities. It’s a space where anything can happen

The words withstand the full brutality of day. We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

People from various worlds often likened the Way to a tree, or a branching vine. Suriel had always thought of it more as a network of veins, stretching out in all directions from a central heart. The Way touched everything, bringing order, stability, and protection from the ravages of the void. Only in the shelter of the Way could life and reason e

Each novel or story is a path (because it’s linear, because it begins on page one and goes on steadily through all the pages in the usual order until it gets to the end) that goes through a wood. The wood is the world in which the characters live and have their being; it’s the realm of all the things that could possibly happen to them; it’s the not

It was the idea of a “pathless path,” something I found in David Whyte’s book The Three Marriages. To Whyte, a pathless path is a paradox: “we cannot even see it is there, and we do not recognize it.”⁠1 To me, the pathless path was a mantra to reassure myself I would be okay. After spending the first 32 years of my life always having a plan, this k

The pathless path is an alternative to the default path. It is an embrace of uncertainty and discomfort. It’s a call to adventure in a world that tells us to conform. For me, it’s also a gentle reminder to laugh when things feel out of control and trusting that an uncertain future is not a problem to be solved.