Choosing The World Less Traveled

I don't know if it's true, but I like to imagine it could be.

That there are no rules, no already informed secret intel in my upbringing that would make me who I have become.

Me, a tiny soldier following orders I didn't even realize were being given.

I wanted to be magnificent, and I wanted this for you.

I wanted not so much to shine as to be a part of the light itself, wiggling my way into the brilliance of being like a tractor on autopilot.

I wanted you to shine also, your tiny magnificence, a celebration of everything that is possible and a yes in this whirlwind of being human.

The hard part is hard, and only that. Digesting difficulties in deep swallows, feeling everything, mind in overdrive to survive.

I'm speaking unintentionally in circles. Got to get back to the heart.

I saw a path not so much lined with daisies or even fences, just a dirt meandering that was meant for bare feet.

And I truly believed if I just kept walking, I would continue to end up here with you.

Just another set of happy feet doing their job, trudging the road to happy destiny.

I've broken so many rules on the way. I didn't see them coming. Didn't believe they were possibly meant for me. Wasn't ready to collapse the urgency for being free.

You broke the rules also. Said no to adults and other children and even now to yourself when what is expected of you doesn't land rightly in the spaces inside that are only yours. Where I hope to always be able to meet you.

Winning is a curious thing then, isn't it?

Being good at what you've chosen and how being good at something can foster a tendency even to keep on doing a thing, perhaps beyond the call of your deepest longing, perhaps beyond any certain choosing.

You are good at so many things. Being a son, being curious, performing, taking a path so deliberately and with abandon down one road that the trees themselves clear their own branchy distractions for your passing.

Good at completion.

I am good at storming the underbelly of being a mom.

I meant to say weathering the storm, but what's actual is the reverse.

A hurricane of miscalculations, a tornado of grief, longing and joy both desperately urging a flood of loving you that only a body designed by a creative intelligence could withstand.

Heat waves, hail, the ridiculous persistence of feeling into the radical seasons of growth.

I wanted to be a teacher, then a president, then an attorney, then a poet.

Well, maybe being a poet wanted to be me more than the other way around, and here I am recollecting the way your small hands and my palms used to give me the entire world.

I know for a fact it is never too late or too early to be the moon or the wind or a random signpost on the side of someone's road you are traveling.

Those things are easy, but to be yourself,

As you are, child, that is the difficult choice.

The road less traveled, being willing to fill your boots with the very feet you are walking on, no socks included, bandageless, blistered, alive.

I am here now, and look how the forest itself has grown and twisted and bowed and accommodate my every move.

And though I owe my life to it that has sustained me, I'm venturing now through new brambles and alone so that I can recognize myself in eternity.

I'll meet you there.