The Road, Reprised

The melody of migration, sweet and winding, alluring and insistent, ever new but always old, still sings in me.

I suspect it always will.

I persist in failing to resist the urge to approach the edge of lands I know, peer dreamily into the distance, and fantasize about the promised land that's surely just beyond.

I ask questions when others have long since become accustomed to not knowing the answers.  They pull me ceaselessly onward, endlessly seeking.

I find myself in The Great Plains:

I stare at a tumbleweed, whooshing by. At first, its strange and lonely way of traveling fills me with a sort of awe. I wonder where it has come from and where it will go, and I realize that I have always gazed upon such entities as friends, fellow members of my motley tribe.

But suddenly I see its distinct deadness.

Suddenly I see that the tumbleweed has no choice, no life, no needs, has nothing at all, save 'freedom.'  But how can freedom be freedom if one cannot choose it?

If the tumbleweed were to cease tumbling, if the tumbleweed were to wish to plant itself somewhere and blossom into something beautiful...

I am overcome with sadness. I pity the tumbleweed, and I wish desperately that I could do something to make it live, to give its tangled tissues a chance, even while I am terrified by my very real comprehension of the essentiality of its lifelessness, a complete and utter surrender to the will of the wind.

I kick at the dirt beneath my still feet as I watch it tumble on, slowly shrinking; a basketball, a tennis ball, a little speck and then nothing. When my eyes fail me, I turn away. A longing I know will never go away wells up in my heart, and suddenly there are tears spilling from my face.

I watch them fall out of my eyes and pool upon the ground for some time before I notice that they are moistening the dirt where a tiny green sprout, no doubt planted there by some errant tumbleweed, is beginning to rise from the ground. The tears flow more strongly, eagerly now, my face embracing its role as some surrealistic sort of watering can, a participant in something much bigger than I've dared to comprehend, subtle and beautiful, coming and going, rising and falling, endlessly dancing all around me.

I draw in my breath, as I hear something faint, but growing stronger. A bass line that accompanies, holds together, gives depth to, the melody that endlessly calls me. It is steady, gentle, wise. It is whispering, “Get home. Get home. Get home...”

[Addendum on January 21st, 2015:
the greatest love poem ever written (or the plight of the divine feminine); a brilliant pearl the universe foisted upon me last night:
you can not choose to not choose can you.]