anupturnedsoul

Meandering Ways

water dust snake

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“I don’t want to be little again. But at the same time I do. I want to be me like I was then, and me as I am now, and me like I’ll be in the future. I want to be me and nothing but me. I want to be crazy as the moon, wild as the wind and still as the earth. I want to be every single thing it’s possible to be. I’m growing and I don’t know how to grow. I’m living but I haven’t started living yet. Sometimes I simply disappear from myself. Sometimes it’s like I’m not here in the world at all and I simply don’t exist. Sometimes I can hardly think. My head just drifts, and the visions that come seem so vivid.”
― David Almond

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While walking home from an adventure of sorts, I came across this dust snake in a puddle and it spoke to me…

of meandering ways,

how getting from A to B isn’t always done in a straight line,

how sometimes you have to travel through the alphabet backwards,

skip some letters,

double up on others,

follow their curves,

see where they lead,

and even if it seems like the detour is leading you away from where you want to be,

and every step takes you further afield (and you didn’t want to be in a field at all),

it may be drawing you closer

but to get where you want to go you must learn what goes with it and what goes with it may require taking a meandering way.

You’d miss a lot of things if you only traveled in a straight line…

if this Summer was always sunny,

if all the recent thunderstorms did not wander across the skies in these parts

I’d have never encountered the dust snake in the water as the puddle would not exist.

6 comments

  1. The picture is impressive, i was almost scared! And what you say is deep and poignant, I would like to be so Wise to consider my wandering pilgrimages off the main road as meaningful instead of a waste of time.i now feel time as sand through my fingers, everything is ephemere and i can’t find much meaning to my life. You always focus a sensitive spot, you are so talented:))

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    • Thank you very much 🙂

      It was such a cool shape. I almost missed it because it’s in a large puddle near the road and I was looking ahead to where I was going to be, to the traffic zipping by and having to cross the road, rather than where I was, and I was also in the middle of a conversation so basically I was anywhere but in the here and now, but I had to navigate the edge of the puddle and the sun came out from behind the clouds at that moment and suddenly I saw it and it snapped me into the here and now.

      I’ve spent most of my life fighting myself and the way that life wants to take me, my life always seems to want to take me the long way around and I usually want to take a direct route, but as I get older I’m beginning to appreciate taking the long way around rather than the direct route.

      Life can often appear to be meaningless… I like to give it a meaning even if the meaning is just a momentary movement of particles in a puddle. 🙂

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  2. I love your photo. 🙂 Initially, I thought it was a picture of the sky because some leaves are reflected in the water. I’m always amazed at what I think I know, and then it turns out to be something different. 🙂

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    • Thank you 🙂

      I tend to play it safe and assume that I know nothing 😉 It helps that I have dyslexia which regularly reminds me that my perspective is often skewed. I saw a headline the other day about someone who had almost ‘overdosed on chocolate’ which sounded intriguing as I’d never heard of that happening, but when I clicked on the article it turned out that I’d read the word ‘cocaine’ as ‘chocolate’. I’m really relieved that I’m not in charge of baking cakes for the local fete 😉

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