Life long learning!
Last time I posted seems so long ago.I wonder if I have said everything I needed to say? Have I retired and started to sink into a timeless reverie ? Friends say that it takes about a year to really relax after a lifetime of work.I am enjoying the freedom and relaxation but I do feel that I should be achieving more, more writing,sewing etc., getting a new direction perhaps? There are so many things to do that I seem to be flitting from one thing to another without finishing! I think that I have a dose of retirement guilt.Have I done enough with my life,was it all worthwhile?
The way through the woods.
1. 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.
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.
Rudyard Kipling
1. 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.
Autumn is always so beautiful and brings with it a certain ache, remembrance of times past and those who have left us. Perhaps it is useful to allow a little melancholy as the leaves fall.
So many things are happening in the world that seem cruel and backward looking,the rise of nationalism and the way people are being turned away from compassion and empathy.
It is easy to feel that you may never see sanity in your own lifetime .
Looking back too much is unhealthy and depressing.
Live for each day,I know that is the way forward and enjoy the simple things. Love and learning go on forever and the way will become clear .I am probably looking too far ahead and must take some time out to recharge the batteries.Then I hope that creativity will flow again.
