“se hace camino al andar”

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
:

In English…

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing else;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.

:

—- Antonio Machado

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antonio_Machado

I stumbled across this quote when googling the phrase in the title which showed up in a comment to an article in the Guardian.  “John Berger: ‘Writing is an off-shoot of something deeper’”     ( http://www.webcitation.org/6Ux6IljzD )

The article exhorts a broader definition to language than just words.  Not words but meaning is the thing.

I like to think that words are just a rough and incomplete approximation of the  thoughts that we as humans, maybe all animals, conceive.  The author gets a little too metaphysical for my tastes and verges on the political (even though he himself states “Most mainstream political discourse today is composed of words that, separated from any creature of language, are inert. “)

But the comments save the article in my opinion and, ultimately, led me to the phrase “se hace camino al andar” and thus to “the road is made by walking.”.

This is a little deeper than “It’s the journey, not the destination, that counts”.  This is the realization that there is no journey unless you keep moving along. It’s easy and fatal to accomplishment to let inertia win.

So the article had value beyond the authors words after all.

-jgp