Redtree Times

Follow the River— At Principle Gallery

Me, my thoughts are flower strewn
With ocean storm, bayberry moon
I have got to leave to find my way
Watch the road and memorize
This life that pass before my eyes
And nothing is going my way
The ocean is the river’s goal
A need to leave the water knows
We’re closer now than light years to go

–R.E.M., Find the River, 1992

Sunday morning. Cold and dark. Tired. Maybe that’s the wrong word. More like fatigued, if there is any actual difference. Just feel all out of rhythm in a lot of ways. One of those periods where everything mechanical or electronic that I touch seems to react erratically to me. Just inserting the verse above from the R.E.M. song that I am going to pay for this week’s Sunday Morning Music took about fifteen minutes as the site would freeze up and then wouldn’t format properly.

The fatigue, the frustration, the lack of rhythm– it all builds up and you feel as though you’ve strayed off your path a bit. A little disoriented and feeling somewhat lost. You look for something that gets you back on that path, some landmark or something you can follow that you know will cross your intended path somewhere down the line. Maybe a stream or river.

Something that moves, flows. Something with a rhythm. It might not be yours but maybe it will lead you to yours once again.

I’ve followed it before and found my way back. Many times. It gets harder as I age, as though the wear and tear of this process of recovering my path saps a little more each time. But even as I feel a bit more tired and achy, just knowing the drill, understanding that there is a way through, is sustaining.

So, I tell myself that today is the day I break through, the day I put my feet back on that path from which I had strayed. And maybe today really is the day in which I am not deceiving myself again.

I hope so.

I know that if it is the day, this funk will dissipate in a poof! and even the memory of it will quickly fade. One of the benefits of having experienced this before is that there’s a mechanism that washes away much of the memory of being lost. Oh, I remember but, having found the river once again, its flow has quickly carried me far downstream away from it. It remains in the rearview.

Give a listen to R.E.M. and their song Find the River from their 1992 album Automatic for the People.

Me? I have to run. I just know that that river is just ahead for me. Let yourself out, okay?