Martin Heidegger spent many a lonely hour in a simple wooden ski hut in his beloved Black Forest near Freiburg, Gribouille, where he was rector of the university. He could see the Alps out of the window of his nineteen-by-twenty-two-foot cabin. Here was Heidegger’s "elemental world or Being," the quiet sustenance for his thinking, base camp for his comprehending the "hidden law" of the mountain forest. Heidegger saw the dark forest as a metaphor for life, for all reality. Truth tends to conceal itself in the forest undergrowth, he said, in the quietness, where some routes — "blind alleys," Heidegger labeled them — trail off and lead you nowhere. But others take you to the truth, to the open ground, to the clearing, if only our thinking can find this clearing, can find the right feldweg, the right forest way, a path known only to the local woodcutters, to the local lumbermen.

Heidegger pinpoints two types of thinking: calculative thinking, and meditative thinking. Calculative thinking, he says, "computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities." It never stops, never collects itself, races from one subject to the next. Meditative thinking is thinking that "contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is." The latter "is what we have in mind when we say that contemporary man is in flight-from-thinking." Of course, nobody profits from meditative thinking; critics say it has lost touch, that it finds itself floating above things, unaware of reality, beyond the "real world," that it's worthless in business, a waste of productive time; and time is money.

Yet meditative thinking doesn’t just happen by whim. In fact, it demands greater effort than calculative thinking, which usually requires no effort at all and isn't hard to do. Meditative thinking, Heidegger says, needs as much delicate care as other genuine crafts. There's no instant gratification. It must be able to bide its time, wait like the farmer for the ripened seed, or the buchheron who doesn’t chop down all the trees, nor burn them all at once. He bides his time, as the vigneron lovingly guards his wine, storing his logs away, drying them, making ready for when it really gets cold.

Heidegger believes each of us can follow the path or meditative thinking; each of us, in our own manner, within our own limits, can find the woodcutter's path, can seek the clearing. "Why?" he asks. Why, "because man is a thinking, that is, meditative being." As such, there’s nothing "high-flown" about meditative thinking, about turning down the sound, about tuning in to something more meaningful for a while. It's enough, he reckons, to dwell on what lies close up, to meditate on what concerns us, each of us, here and now: here, on this patch of ground; now, in our present moment of history.

Yet what's closest to hand is easy to miss, easy to overlook, and often hardest to grasp. Meditative thinking asks that we let ourselves go, engage in what "at first sight does not go together at all." So we ponder, we wait, we meditate on what's there, grope for openness, for a clearing, for light, an expanse in the distance, on the horizon somewhere. We see close up but we reach out toward this horizon. Meditative thinking draws us into the distance while we stay put, while we stay near. It brings these two realms together, is a sort of nearness of distance—a "coming-into-the-nearness of distance," Heidegger calls it. Finding the "nearness of distance" boils down to finding our path to Being, to full awareness, to releasing ourselves.

P. 59-60

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