Jan. 26 2015

Today, I was thinking about what the phrase, The Red Road, might mean, understanding that it has been taken up by a number of different groups for different reasons. Most of the Google hits are about a TV series I’ve never seen. It is used also by those recovering from addictions. But it seems it was appropriated from Native American beliefs. Yet even there it differs from tribe to tribe. Do I even have the right to use the phrase in my own way? Perhaps not. But it leads me to think about other paths: Robert Frost’s two roads in the poem, The Road Not Taken, the yellow brick road from the Wizard of Oz, and later Elton John. At the end of the Wizard, Dorothy repeats over and over, “there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…”  Is what I am looking for at home?  Is it already in my own mind, a place of healing thought and meditation…?

Dorothy meets the Cowardly Lion, from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz first edition. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Which road shall I walk along today?
Perhaps one of Frost’s divergent paths—
no, it is winter and no paths are yellow,
not even the one that leads to Oz.

 Even at the end of that road, there is only
a fake wizard, a city where we learn that
everything we need will be found at home,
everything we seek inside ourselves already.

 Perhaps the Red Road too is not mine,
an inappropriate appropriation, other beliefs
I can never hope to know. Nothing external
speaks to me today, only what is here, internal.

 
CAS Jan 26 2015