From the first he had borne within him a great sorrow which made him flee. The company of others and kept him shut away indoors.
It had been so ever since a mourner had told him: "which beautiful face does not end up buried in dust?" A great grief settled on him, shattering his tranquility. People asked of him: "What pains you?" He told them what had occurred and that his heart was cold at this world. "Something has come over me. I know of no way through it and neither books, nor decrees yield an answer." They told him that home held no refuge for him, that he must set out down the road, keep silence and regard the path: "the road itself will yield the answer to your heart's thousand questions." And he went in search of the road.
The road was continuous, without end, a winding road leading no-where, criss-crossed lines on a page of dust, like the lines of a child's game drawn on paper. People are like ants, in search of their daily bread, discovering routes for travel and travel itself. And at last, when he beheld the path, he saw the tale of man: that man has one road in life, running from the end to the beginning, down which he is endlessly searching for meaning, and in this boundless existence each has his own road, sometimes endless, winding, sometimes leading nowhere, sometimes a straight line, a path leading to a garden, the shade of a tree, a spring in rocky ground.
The road is the expression of man's journey, in search of provisions. The road is the illustration of the soul that has no peace, and the body is the pack animal of the soul that carries it from place to place. Whoever neglect his pack animal will never reach his journey's end, but the journey of man continues. Our roads are like ourselves, sometimes stony, sometimes paved, sometimes winding, sometimes straight, and the paths we draw on the earth are like scratches upon it. And we have other ways inside us, ways of sadness, ways of joy, ways of love, ways of thought, ways of escape, and sometimes ways which spring from hatred, ways which destroy us, ways which go nowhere, ways without a conclusion like a stagnant river. The road is man's confession of the places he is fleeing from, the places he is heading. The road is life, the road is man, and man's road, however small, flows on the page of existence, sometimes without conclusion, sometimes victorious.
Dear Lord,
Give us rain from tame,
obedient clouds
And not from dense
and fiery clouds
which summon death.
Amen.
Nahjolbalaqa