Thinking tonight about how way leads onto way. Robert Frost had that right. The roads we travel on lead to other roads. It's a journey called life. I have always been the most careful person you would ever meet....I won't ride roller coasters, I don't go to Halloween spook houses or scary movies, and am really not much of a risk taker. I'm just a pretty normal mom, wife, daughter, sister, and female. But, for some reason, in recent years I have found myself traveling down the roads less traveled...working with children in the Andes Mountains in Ecuador at Quechua Villages, teaching school at an orphanage in Ecuador, walking down a red dirt road in Uganda and teaching art-music-drama at an orphanage there, touring schools in Cuba and delivering nearly 1,000 pieces of art from my students, and teaching an art workshop at a school in Switzerland. The memories I have made are still so close to my thoughts.....children in all of these countries who are so loving, nearly going off a cliff in a huge bus, walking for hours and hours and hours down a red dirt road in the most remote and rural area imaginable with two young twenty-year-olds in Africa with no car or phone, the generosity of women everywhere.....cooking their finest for me...guinea pic in Ecuador...plantains every way possible in Uganda with a big tall glass of warm cow's milk....sharing their lives....their generosity....their love. It's a big world out there full of people who really truly care about other people. I'm not much of a risk taker...but I care. I think that is more important. So...way leads to way....one journey leads to another.....I think there are a few more to go on before someone forces me to sit in a rocking chair! One of my goals is to teach school, even short term, on each of the seven continents. So far that has happened on four of them: North America, Africa, South America, Europe. Asia, Antarctica, and Australia are left. I'm hoping to work out an opportunity to teach at a school in Istanbul this summer....on the Asian side! Not sure if that will happen but have a few good leads...so we shall see! Have to keep eARThshaking and making friends on this planet. You see....I believe it is what you give in life that matters the most, not what you get. But, the simple truth is that a teacher always gets more than they give. It's just that simple. Children just simply love. Wouldn't it be nice if the whole world was like that?
The Road Not Taken
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 clam
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 sign
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.
-Robert Frost
