My mind is full this morning, crowded with memory, melancholy, snippets & vignettes of a long-ago life. Faces brought forward into the now, twenty years older, trapped in the what was: the Who I Was, the What I Did, seemingly uninterested in knowing the Who I Am Now, myself guarded, wary of reveal. Bits of sadness, remnants of joy, remembered pain carelessly inflicted, the reality of relationship not to be, clamor & jostle for place.

Gratefully, with the meditative repetition of legs moving, lungs filling, body alone under white cloud-blue sky, safe among guardian firs, refreshed by the gentle morning breeze, the melee slows, then evaporates. All that eyes, ears, nose, even skin take in brings back the present, the important, the connection. It is true that “way leads on to way”, but here is where I am, and for today, here is where I am meant to be.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

-Robert Frost