Not All Who Wander Are Lost

In the evenings I empty my pockets of blogs that might have been, postcards from a life on the road. In and out of days, weeks, a month and more, they pile up in my computerside cubbyholes: a growing catalogue of the unread and unedited, living out a darkened existence on the back of envelopes and old maps in a shaky hand.

They cry out to me, sometimes, when I cannot sleep, these almost illegible scrawls, written up against the steering wheel on the back roads and highways.

Some excerpts from a life unblogged:

...Every once in a while on a different way home I pass the house not taken and wonder what that life would have been. Back on our familiar streets closer to home, the neighbors have removed the inflatible leprecaun from the lawn, though the tinsel shamrocks still swing from the trees. How much polyurethane, how much air and light, how much sheer commercial kitsch will it take to ring in the subsequent season? What will Easter bring? We'll soon know...

...I'm in therapy now, paying ten bucks a week for the privledge of talking about myself for an hour uninterrupted. The health plan picks up the rest; I wonder what they think I'm getting out of it, whether they'd tell me if I asked, if the answer would help me understand why I go back every week...

...The urge to write still comes, sometimes, but my heart stops me. Without a grand entrance prepared, the prodigal return seems unsurmountable. Does it take humility to come back home? Am I so stubborn still? ...

...I care too much, and cry at the radio, play and replay the same sad songs and stories from This American Life: children challenged for who they are, their parents cursed for who they would never be. I try to care more about people, less about things; more about nature, less about human nature. But still I dwell in my mind's eye, seeing my children in these voices, these rooms, these roads, years from now, in an imperfect world I could not fix for them....

...I've lost my voice, and cannot sing. My sinuses stifle, my ears clog. I cannot hear myself. The poignant pieces of our trivial lives -- this one's first haircut, the paper plate rainbow that one makes for me in school -- overwhelm my senses. I used to want to feel less, to protect my heart. Now the feedback I once depended upon for understanding goes missing, and I know not how to recover it...

This evening after supper I bring in the last of this year's wood. Clearing the line brings light into the yard where no light has been for months; the neighbors house and the woods beyond emerge after a long winter.

Afterwards, in the waning light, I raise my eyes to the sky, give of myself back to the world, give over to the urge. And like an answer, out of grey nowhere, drops begin to fall from the sky.

Snow melts away into Spring below my feet. The smell of ozone fills the air.

I feel the rain on my face.

The rest is still unwritten.

Labels: Spring, wandering, winter, writing