Robert Frost immortalized the fork in the road. Two paths confront the traveler leading, supposedly, to two different journeys and destinations. Some would hold that the two are really one if you see beyond the grass and trees that separate them. Others would offer that there are many more paths which are overgrown and require more effort-we tend to focus on the obvious. And them some would muse that it is not the path that matters, only the journey so why bother naming the paths. Whatever philosophical or spiritual metaphor you choose, the thought of paths beckons our imagination.
Love, on the other hand, enters our hearts unnamed, unnoticed often without a path. Love takes on the names of those who touch our vulnerability, our needs and our hopes. Their presence, like the ocean’s gravity, summons and draws the rivers of our souls. The rivers of our talents, weaknesses, our best and our worst are beckoned home to the ocean through paths cut into the earth. It relents not until all these rivers empty themselves into its vastness, its depths and open arms. Love’s ocean pulls the rivers that have overflowed their banks leaving destruction after a season’s storms. Love’s ocean pulls even the river’s last remaining trickle left after a season’s drought. The rivers think not of paths. The rivers know only the pull of gravity drawing them into the ocean. Some rivers will merge and make the journey together. Others are destined by geography to flow alone. Some rivers will flow forever parallel close, forming borders and touching only during a flood and then retreating. The end is the same. They will meet in the ocean and flow freely, no longer pulled.
And so I muse, as I am apt to do, if instead of seeing paths I saw rivers would this journey be viewed differently?
About Me
- Beth Chapman
- Owatonna, Minnesota, United States
- I have begun a path, though I know not where, to a journey’s end that is calling. Along the way I pause to absorb the metaphors and images of this life, which are so precious. Here you shall find me brave, you shall find me pondering, you shall find me searching, and you shall find me collecting the images and metaphors like shells upon the beach. I am very much like the little monkey wearing a dapper hat, playing the cymbals and drum and dancing a jig. I do not have it all figured out, I may be learning to write, but one thing I do know and that is how to collect the shells on the beach of my beloved Gulf Shores. I offer these shells to you.
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