Blogetary (Weblog + Commentary = Blogetary)

Every so often I like to take stock of my life to see where I’m going and where I’ve been. I like to reassess what I’ve done. Could I have done it better? Should I change course? Where am I going now? Do I LIKE where I’m headed? And other such questions. Typically, I do this around the New Year and my birthday, as they seem, to me, to be time when I’m naturally more introspective anyway.

But sometimes I will hear or read something outside of those times that will make me jerk my head up, and take another look around. Am I still doing the right thing? Have I totally f***ed up? Am I merely following in the tracks of others? Isn’t it okay to follow those tracks rather than remake the wheel? Or should I chart a new course? Go my own way?

I do this when I find myself reading too much what is going on online or in “Writers World” and find I am getting too invested in the arguments going on there. I end up realizing that going my own way includes both following what others have done before, if it seems to work for me, AND charting a new course when that seems to be the better choice. In the end, I need to put my head down and follow what’s important to me. And writing and publishing politics, national and international politics, and online social networking dramas, while important in their own way, aren’t going to help me get my work done. My stories and poetry will not be better by letting my time get sucked away and getting embroiled in conversations about well — so as not to single anything or anyone out — STUFF. It’s a Thinker’s Journey, not to either blindly follow along or blindly go off on your own, but to choose your path carefully amongst the reeds, hummocks, sticks, dirt, pine needles, cactus needles, mud, muck, rocks, grit, streams, pavement, roots, and bodies along the way.

Thinking of this reminded me of two things that I’m still pondering and I’ll leave you with. One is The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost:

The Road Not Taken

by Robert Frost

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.

And a second poem, but one I had written a long time ago when I lived in San Francisco:

Letter to a Friend
By Rachel V. Olivier
…you’re right, you know.
I was on the bus today,
reading over a man’s shoulder.
He was reading Dune.
The man who saw the future —
then collapsed into it.
Trapped on the Wheel of Fortune,
the man made the same mistakes, same choices,
over and over and over again.
Just one step off would save him —
save me.
I want to believe my future is
new fallen snow —
a clean page —
uncharted territory.
Not a path beaten down before,
over and over and over again —
just like the Wheel —
until nothing grows upon it.
So, you’re right to tear up your tarot cards
cast away your rune stones;
right to chart a new course on a different path
and leave it all behind.
Maybe this time if you —
if I —
if We—
step off the Wheel —
we’ll be free.