Hearing what is simple amid the technological noise: can its force still be felt in the current time?

More often, with the years, the oak on the path carries one off with recollections of early play and first choices. If at times, in the middle of the forest an oak fell under the blow of an axe, the father, having crossed through woodland and over sunny clearings, sought the cord allotted for his workshop. Here he spent the time thoughtfully, during pauses in his service at the tower clock and bell, both of which keep their own relationship to time and temporality.

From the oak’s bark, however, the boys cut out their ships, which, equipped with rudder and tiller, floated in the Metten brook or in the school well. The global voyages of their games still easily reached their destinations and returned once more to shore. The dreamlike quality of such travels lay concealed then in a hardly visible splendor, which was cast over everything. The mother’s watch and care surveyed their empire. It was as if her unspoken care guarded all beings. These voyages of play knew nothing yet of those travels, in which all shores remain behind. Meanwhile the hardness and scent of the oaken wood began to speak more distinctly about the slowness and steadiness with which the tree grows. The oak itself said that only in such growth is grounded that which lasts and bear fruit, that to grow means to open oneself up to the span of heaven and at the same time to take root in the darkness of the earth, that everything solid and genuine thrives only when someone is upright in both respects:  both ready for the address of the highest heaven and raised up in the shelter of the bearing earth….

That which is simple preserves the riddle of what is abiding and what is great. In an instant it takes its place among humanity and yet needs a long time to flourish. In the humility of constant sameness it hides its blessing. The expanse of all grown things, which dwell around the field path, bestow the world. In that which their language leaves unspoken, as Meister Eckhart said, the ancient master of reading and living, God is only God.

And yet the field path’s address speaks only as long as there are people who, born in its air, are able to hear it. They are the hearers of their heritage, but not servants of machine powers. Humanity attempts in vain to bring the globe into an order through its plans, when it fails to be subordinated to the address of the field path. The danger looms that contemporaries still close their ears to its language. They hear only the noise of devices, which they behold almost as the voice of God. And so humanity becomes distracted and without a way. To those distracted, the simple appears uniform. That which is uniform becomes wearisome. The weary find only monotony. The simple has escaped. Its quiet force has run out.

It is likely that the number of those who still know the simple as their acquired possession is rapidly shrinking. But the few will be everywhere the ones who last. They will be able to wait out someday, thanks to the gentle power of the field path, the giant forces of atomic energy, which human calculation has crafted for itself and made a shackle for its own activity.

Martin Heidegger, “The Field Path”