My dogs like to run so the more open space they have the better. Mary Oliver wrote
...of all the sights I love in this world—
and there are plenty—very near the top of
the list is this one: dogs without leashes.
and I get to see that truth every day we’re out. Mostly we spend time in the abandoned sports grounds of a local school where we have several acres of overgrown rugby and hockey pitches, tennis courts and cricket creases and they can run in wide circles around me as if we are connected by some invisible centripetal tie of relationship.
In the summer the grass grows to hip height and I can lie flat on the ground, hidden from view, while they hunt me down, bounding through the meadow drawn by whatever scent it is which signals me. In the winter months though, when the grass dies back the fields reveal the tracks left by our small community of dog walkers. Around the edges of the pitches, sometimes following the long erased sidelines, sometimes cutting across the field, are the paths we have worn into the earth.
I remember, from some distant place in my brain, that these are known as desire lines, the shortest and most navigable routes between an origin and a destination. It intrigues me that we human beings are such creatures of habit. More often than not, rather than cutting our own way across the fields, we follow the trails left by others who went before. So much so in fact that the patterns we leave are clearly visible in wilderness trails and urban parks and the worn steps of old cathedrals.
There are paths which we build and routes that we groove into the landscape.
I commute to work on the train from the seaside town of Bangor, Co Down in Northern Ireland, into the city of Belfast. On the approach between Titanic train station and Lanyon Place in the city centre, the train climbs a short steep rise which gives the traveller a view over a vacant city lot that falls down to the Lagan, the river that traces a wide arc on its way through the city. It’s the site of the old Sirocco factory, sixteen acres of post industrial landscape that has lain derelict for more than ten years.
One morning last winter, as I made that journey, the air was icy and sharp and I was already gathering my stuff to exit the train at Botanic, in the University district. I looked down on the Sirocco site, overgrown with tired grass and weeds, and I noticed how the frost had disclosed a pattern of trails across the waste ground.
These were the paths that people had worn into the ground as they nipped across the site taking short cuts into the city. The width of those tracks, and the depth, reveal the levels of traffic. I find it amusing that sometimes our desire to walk the straightest path means we disavow, or disobey, the signs which tell us not to walk this way, and even those which warn us to keep out.
Architects and planners are all too aware of desire lines and, when building something new on former empty spaces, they will often build proper paths along the desire lines. Occasionally, perhaps in the interest of aesthetics, a designer will lay out the most pleasing route through a site, but walkers will continue to use the desire lines. There is a small urban park in Belfast with gates at opposite corners. In the middle of the park is a beautiful lawn with formal pathways laid out in a square around it. But a diagonal route has been worn from gate to gate, across the grass, ignoring the paths and drawing a seam across the grass.
There is wisdom in a desire line.
It is often the simplest and most direct route through the things we have constructed between us. As few as fifteen passages across open ground are enough to create a way to be followed, to wear a groove into the ground for others to follow.
But this city of Belfast is a city of anomalies. Through the many years of our violent conflict we have ended up building high walls blocking routes and paths between communities which claim different allegiances and identities. These walls, known bizarrely as Peace Lines, sometimes cut through parks, schools, even churches. It seems a contradiction but it’s true that more of these high walls have been built since the peace agreement was signed than were ever built during the height of the conflict.
They may be an indication that while we are no longer in the midst of a violent conflict we still have not managed to create the desire for true reconciliation, nor removed the fear of difference which might enable us to establish new routes towards relationships of peace.
Recently, with a group of ordinands for the Anglican priesthood, I stood shivering in the shadow of the oldest Peace Wall while tourists scribbled their names and motivational comments onto the concrete. We then moved to the other side of that same wall and viewed it from the upper floors of a Catholic monastery in whose rooms politicians once met, having arrived secretly through separate doors in order to craft the agreements that ultimately ended the fighting. The wall snaked its way across the landscape, making visible the awful truth that there are two communities here in the one place and we have built a wall between them which is higher than the homes of the people on either side.
Priests and congregants from this Redemptorist monastery continue a long-established tradition of pilgrimage, leaving their sanctuary each Sunday morning and traveling across these literal and figurative walls which separate us, to worship with those who would otherwise remain strangers. In doing so they make new routes, new paths which indicate their desire to break down these walls that interrupt the connecting roads across difference. In tracing these new ways they give hope to us all that we can navigate around walls of division; that through persistence and good courage we can wear new ways into the earth which defy the signs that tell us there is no way through here.
So I marvel at the boldness of the pioneers who are the first to walk over neglected ground to make a way from one place to another. Not just in the landscape of a city, but from one human heart to another, creating new routes through the things we have allowed grow up between us.
Glenn Jordan is Public Theologian at the Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland, where he has worked on peace building and reconciliation for more than thirty years..
