As The Crow Flies


Image result for Mackinac Island

Mackinac Island; http://www.cityofmi.org/

 

“Thar she is,” the captain pointed.

She stared at the lighthouse across a desert of stacked ice shards and patches of wet cold.

“How far are we?”

The grizzled man lifted a hand against the horizon as if measuring. “Ah, ’bout a mile, as the crow flies.”

Might as well be ten thousand, she thought. Years, too.

He’d left the engines idling but refused to get her any closer. Would not lend her a kayak, either. “Too chocked up,” he’d said.

She reiterated her urgency but still he would not be swayed.

“She’d give up her ice soon,” he nodded at the lake. His attempt at kindness.

Soon would be too late. She swallowed bitterness. The estate was scheduled to be liquidated the next morning. Without photo proof of her early childhood scrawls in the lighthouse’s attic, she’d lose the inheritance. Illegitimate in a whole new way.

 

For What Pegman Saw

 

 

Overcome

butterfly2 AmitaiAsif

Photo: Amitai Asif

 

As change and challenge come

And you are stretched

Beyond what seems possible

To overcome,

Recall

How transformation

Can become

Its own journey

To an unexpected

Outcome.

 

 

 

For The Daily Post

Possibility

Craggy Garden on Blue Ridge Pkwy NC July04Girl

Blue Ridge Parkway NC; Photo: July04Girl

I don’t know if I can

I don’t know if I can’t

My life flows in the spaces

Between heart and mind

As I wait to unfold

Into what will evolve

Around corners

Behind bumps

Where possibility

Stands.

Gateways

inisheer

Photo by: anselmona

On the almost eve of a new year, may your path hold clear as you pass into the nascent potential of what is almost born to be. For it can be, in truth, all that there can be.

Not all newness smells of radical divergence. In every sense, all paths we take form in the footsteps of those we already walked. It is where we head, how we carry our present time and what we see as possible, that breathes new life into the future. Farmers toiled for centuries, building fences to clear fertile ground and to protect the livestock with the use of the very rocks that made obstacles for plows. Stones remained stones even as they have become all that and then some.

We, too, are what we always were … and then some. We are who we know to be and what we learned to do about it, how we join the paths of others, how we forge our own to clear ground for new growth (hopefully in compassionate persistence). We are how we build with what is there. How we tend to obstacles and plow potential. What we form within us and around us. How we become what we know.

May the path hold clear in sun and mist, in fog and rainbow. May it be.

§§§

Gateways:

Every gate you pass holds pathways

Of times walked through

Stone by stone.

Every passage holding steady

Leaning onto

All that’s gone.

Every walkthrough

Every newness

Wraps around the times you know.

All the pebbles

Rocks

Big Boulders

That held back

Allowed

Remembered

All that needed

Fought

To grow.

garden gate