In May of 2011, Sister Jann McClary and her husband Tariq moved from the Washington DC metropolitan area to establish a new home in the mountains of Colorado, building it from the ground up as part of their plan to become free of the spiritual and physical stress of modern urban life. Sister Jann is documenting her experiences for the Muslim Link. See her earlier installments at www.muslimlinkpaper.com by searching for Running for the Hills. Make sure you select Exact Phrase in the search options. TML
By Jann McClary
Muslim Link Contributing Writer
It's dark and rich like chocolate. It's thick and smooth like pudding. It's slippery and dangerous like a layer of black petroleum jelly, so obviously I'm not talking about everyone's favorite dessert. I'm talking about the muddy little country road that leads to our little sanctuary back in the woods. Funny thing about back in the woods: you often have to carve your own way to get there. 
Making your way off the beaten track and into the wilds of anywhere is an adventure often fraught with uncertainty, risk and vulnerability, but also anticipation of the benefits that lay ahead at the destination. The muhajiroon left situations of familiarity, stability and maybe some degree of comfort to travel over byways and passages from Makkah to Madinah. Traveling through the desert is a tricky thing when you're following only a direction and there are no signposts or discernible roads, just landmarks and shifting sands. But sand's a good thing. It doesn't stick to your tires, and because it's desert sand, well, it doesn't get wet too very often and cause you to say things to the road that might make your recording angels blush.
On the other hand, a continent away, there's the Rocky Mountains. I found out the first year we were here and I tried to dig out garden beds as if I were still in Maryland, that they're called Rocky Mountains for good reason. Now I know what holds all those rocks together. It's clay. Otherwise known in wet weather as mud. Thick, heavy, tire-sucking, slow-drying mud. And when you live outside the city limits that's what 90 percent of the roads here are. The county road clay gets cleverly disguised as a normal rural road by tons and tons of what's called road base, a mixture of sand and various-sized gravel. Over the years it gets packed down and graded smooth over and over again until it's hard and relatively smooth. And the deeper it's packed, 8 to 10 inches is ideal, the better the road. Works pretty well when it's being paid for by the county's dime, but at $200 for 15 tons of road base that will only stretch about 70-90 feet at 3 inches deep, you can imagine how long it'll take us to build up the five roads we've put on our property.
Homesteading involves designing and building your own infrastructure, and the roads you build to make your way around your place are key. Sure, you could just keep hopping over and scrambling around every rock, bush and tree to get where you want to go, but how's that gonna work for efficiency? After a short while you'll get tired of all the wasted energy and frustration you'd have put out to go from point A to point B, stubbing your toes on one obstacle after another. There's gotta be a better way, right?
Sand and gravel take care of the foundation for your physical road. Niyyah is like the clay base for your spiritual road. How deep and weighty it is will make the road firm enough to hold in place what comes next; the ibaadah, du'ah and dhikr which are the grains of sand that enrich the clay and save you from sinking down in it and going nowhere. And what holds this all together? The little pebbles and stones. The good deeds. Without adding them to the mix, the sand and clay might look like a road, but test it with some weight and you'll still have trouble moving down your road. Clay and sand look solid on a good, sunny, dry day, but when the weather gets rough and the clay gets hit with rain and snow you'll see how much the pebbles and stones complete and perfect it. Ali (radiallahu anhu) once remarked how the journey is long, the provision is short and the way is dangerous. This trip back to Allah subhana wa ta'ala can be challenging to navigate, so make your path to Him filled with the road base that keeps you sure-footed and on solid ground.
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