Mama Says Om - Freedom

I think ruefully of all the vanished and benighted years when I was motoring downtown in early morning, dressed in a business suit and carrying an attache case, resolute of chin and grimly determined to "get through" myriad daily office panics and traumas as yet unknown. If anyone had suggested that I was not free then, I would have been indignant and rude too, perhaps given that person an evasive answer.

These days, I walk another road, one which is usually unpaved and (more or less) untravelled - it meanders along hedgerows, through old trees, down steep gorges into orchid bogs and up across stony hills. There is no business suit and no attache case, just my camera and a battered pack holding spare lenses, water bottles and Cassie's canine treats. There is usually a compass tucked in there somewhere too.

We have time to pause and peer into hedgerows and trees together and watch butterflies cavorting in the milkweed, to watch the light shift and flow across the hills and clouds pile up in the sky before a storm, to take pleasure in the waning moon dancing up there in the blue at sunrise and pouring her serenity over everything.

Now, we are free, like the butterflies we saw in the milkweed this morning and the cavorting cottontails on the village common, but there are times when I could weep when I think of the years wasted. What on earth was I thinking of then? I hope that I learned something, but I am not sure that I did.

Written for the inspiring mamas at Mama Says Om.