The Brookside Path

How strange that the mind would rather make monsters than acknowledge that it walks a path alone.

Paths are everywhere. We find ourselves so constantly immersed in them that we often fail to realize that we are on them at all. There are the paths of neurons in our brains. The paths of nerve endings through our bodies. The paths of our days, of our weeks, of our lives. The paths of others with which we intersect; sometimes for but a moment, sometimes for a lifetime.

It is the kind of thing that if you took a moment to map out in front of you, to draw all of the paths that you are a part of, you’d risk running yourself on to the tangled path of madness. And so, instead, we choose to ignore them, but in single moments, sometimes their presence must be acknowledged. When the traveling of the path becomes the very act of life instead of simply a subplot.

Perhaps this is why the actual physical paths that we travel can have such an impact. Everyone can think back on a path that they knew all too well. Perhaps a shortcut through town which removed you from the well-worn steps of your fellow men and women. Perhaps the path to school or work or the house of your lover. Perhaps a path you took when you needed to escape, a path that took you away from the chaos of life, one that gave you the space to breathe and think. I had such a path, one that was all of these things, and more. A path which despite having only one exit, branched out into the endless paths of my life which I still walk today.

My parents lived in a part of town that was tucked against the foothills. Not far from town, but simply a bit hidden. The road to drive there took a roundabout route, forcing you to go a dozen blocks or so out of your way to get to the single entrance of this secret neighborhood. There did exist, however, a small footpath initially carved by nature, which cut through an old forest that would allow the wayfaring traveler a shortcut into the heart of town. I cannot say for certain how long the path had been in use by man, but alongside it ran a small brook which had at one point decided that it too, did not have the time to travel the extra blocks into the heart of town.

This brook ran half of the year, as soon as the weather turned warm enough to melt the snow in the highlands and until the weather cooled enough for the snow to freeze back over. This was more than enough time for the trees and vines and spring blossoms to gorge themselves on that mountain flow - nourishing cottonwoods and ash trees, lilac bushes and forget-me-nots. Quenching the thirst of this small piece of forest which seemed to exist apart from the rest of the world.

Now, as much as I would like to claim this path as my own, something found by the impatience of youth, that would be credit undue to me. All of the neighborhood knew the path, and as time passed, as is the case with any shortcut in a world with no time, the footsteps wore it down to dirt. Ah, it is not as bad as it sounds. You must have a path worn to dirt to stop the oblivious from trampling flowers.

Nonetheless, despite the thousands of footsteps, I had carved my own name into the path.

There is something that we often forget about paths, we focus so much on where they start and to where they get us that we ignore the moment of being on the path itself. By it’s very nature a path is bound to be discussed in terms of relationships. The relationship from this place to that. The relationship to the time it takes to go this way and the time it takes to go another. It is only once we travel a path frequently enough that we find ourselves able to acknowledge our relationship to the path itself.

It was only as I had gotten older and, although I cannot be certain, wiser, that I became aware of how my path had carved itself into the very person I had become.

The marvelous thing about a path so close to home, a path that you walk so many times, is that you begin to realize how the very course of your life dictates how you see the path.

You begin to notice that to walk the path at 3:00 AM, when there is no moon in the sky and the stars are swallowed up by the arms of ancient trees, is terrifying - when you are returning home alone. Yet, to walk the path at 3:00 AM, when the moon is new and a sprinkling of stars can be seen through the brush of the trees, becomes beautiful, a Shakespearian forest - when sneaking out to meet a girl.

You suddenly realize that to start the path in a perfectly content mood, you will exit the path with a gleam in your eye and wave to the next stranger you see, provided you walked the path in spring. Yet, to start the path in a perfectly content mood, you will exit the path with your chin tucked low and your hood pulled tight, driven inward by the winter monotony of a forest in hibernation.

It is perhaps, something that we should notice about our lives more often. The ebbs and flows, the moods driven upon us by the outside world and the look we imprint upon the outside world with our moods.

Ah, but who can be bothered. Who can be bothered to notice the path and the man who is on it? A path is for getting somewhere and I have places to be, dinners to get to, lovers to meet, records to set, a life to live!

“Who can be bothered?” shouts the always busy man.

“Who can be bothered?” shouts the late woman.

As they rush down the path unaware that when they reach the end, they will find that there was nowhere at all that they needed to be.

There is a strange thing that happens to me on the path. It does not happen every time I walk it - as I have said, the light in which I see the path changes like the phases of the moon - but it happens enough to have been of note. There are certain circumstances that are the same every time it happens, it must be night - and a night in which the darkness is thick and sits heavy above my head. I must be alone, which tends to be the case more often than it is not. And I must have entered the path with my mind turned in upon itself, ignorant of the trees or the brook or the birds with which I share the path.

When all of these circumstances are met, I find myself stepping onto the path and looking out into the inky darkness ahead of me, and seeing the shapes and shadows of all of the monsters which have haunted mankind for millenia shifting in the obscurity. Ghouls and goblins, witches and werewolves, murderers and bears and devils; I can feel them lurking, and my heart races as my head whips side to side searching. If only I could see them wringing their hands impatiently, bearing teeth and sharpening claws, and chuckling evilly to one another. How can you fight what you do not know? What you cannot see? My mind searches and in each empty space a new monster springs into being. The path becomes full of hundreds of beasts - and I feel more alone than I have ever felt.

When I was young, though not much younger than I am now, I fled. When I found myself face to face with that feeling, I would tuck my head low and I would run as fast as my legs would take me, the cracking of twigs or the sound of the wind would turn my veins to ice, and I would not dare peek behind me until my feet had found the familiar echo of rubber soles on asphalt.

It was only when I had begun to notice the communication between me and the path, the way that sometimes I was the sheet music and it the piano man and other times I was the one lucky enough to direct the melody, that I was able to walk the path during these moments of ancient terror. I would be a liar if I pretended it came all at once. I have found that to be rarely the true course of events. It is only in the err of our memory that it seems that one day we leap from young to old or happy to miserable or foolish to wise. That foolish ignorance of forgetting when we are walking on the path itself.

No, it was a slow occurrence. Where I had previously sprinted the entire length, I suddenly found the courage to merely jog the beginning. As though I realized that the world was still close at hand in those early steps, and that if need be, should anything too terrifying spring upon me, I had a coward’s retreat nearby. That jog eventually became the quick steps of a man running just a few minutes behind - “Oh no, Sir. I’m not running from ghosts! Simply late is all. I really must be going!”

As my steps slowed, and for perhaps the first time, my mind was given enough time to take in this witch’s forest The forest that I realized I knew all too well. The forest that I had seen in full bloom or stark naked, covered in snow or hidden by the low fog of rainclouds. I had walked through that forest with my head craned towards the sun and with my eyes turned towards the ground to watch grasshoppers evade my giant’s steps. I had found myself face to face with bobcats and bluebirds and heartbreak and treachery along that path. What was different? Why should I be so terrified now? After everything? What made me want to run?

For the first time, while I walked that path with the suffocating, unforgiving, stifling darkness closing in around me, I stopped. I probably only stopped for a few seconds but my mind raced with enough thoughts for days. My eyes shifted in the dark, desperate for those slivers, those dustings of light which they can usually find, that they can use to build even a piecemeal picture of the world. My ears were sharp, and I sniffed the air like weary prey or hungry predator. Yet, my senses found nothing.

Only me. Of course.

Who else did I expect to find? Had I really thought that after my hundreds of trips down the path, on nights just like tonight, it would be chock full of ghosts? For Christ’s sake, during all my sprints and jogs I had never come across another soul.

There was only me. Me and the monsters. The monsters which were simply me.

Perhaps, all of the people who came before me, the cavemen and peasants and monarchs and travelers of times long ago knew this all along. They knew as I now do, that their were no monsters in their forests apart from the ones which they created. And perhaps they knew, as I now do, that this did not make these monsters any less dangerous.

I find myself today, on those strange nights, walking the path. Walking it the same as I always do. I still remain weary, for only a fool walks a dark path at night and does not prepare himself for the possibility of a fight, but I do not run. I never run.

You see, there is a bit of magic that happens to us when we start paying attention to the path that we are on. You begin to notice that it is only you on the path. Oh, do not be mistaken. There are trees and birds and flowers and creeks, sometimes their are friends and lovers and family and fights. But they are all on a path that is not quite your own and is instead only theirs to travel. When you begin to pay attention to the path you notice how you let the path effect you, and that it is entirely possible for you to be the one who creates the path rather then letting the path create you. And if you stay sharp, if you really pay attention then you begin to find the things that you had thought were unreachable.

You uncover the monsters of your own creation, you fight them with the tools earned during your travels, and when you look behind you to the place of the fight, you see only yourself. Alone. Yes. But wonderfully so. For if you were not alone to walk this path, then it would be left untraveled, and if that were so, would it be a path at all?

I still walk this path on more days than not. I still find myself growing cold when I hear footsteps at night, and growing giddy when the alliums burst open in the spring. I still find myself facing monsters and finding friends and rushing to meet lovers all along the path - for even though there were times when the lessons learned or fights fought had led me to believe I had reached the end of the path, instead it continued to stretch out in front of me.

You see, the world has taught us that memoirs must be from our pasts, and so in the act of remembering we tend to believe that we are pulling from finished stories . . . but that is not really how life works, is it? We do not get to exit the path and look fondly behind us at the challenges faced. No. We are always on that path, and the places we were, continue to create the people that we are in each upcoming moment. It is an active process. The path of our Lives. To leave pieces behind only makes the parts still in front of you all the more difficult.

There exists a path in a city tucked up against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It travels alongside a brook which runs for half of the year when the sun grows hot and the melting snow searches for oceans. It is home to ancient cottonwoods and strangely shaped pines, bleeding heart flowers and late-summer chicory blooms. I have walked this path quite a number of times in my life, but for so long it had merely been the means of arriving somewhere else. At some point, this little brookside path tucked up against the foothills and leading to the heart of town made sure I noticed it - made me pay attention to the path itself. For that, I am forever in its debt.