We know what we are, but know not what we may be. --Shakespeare

(Photo is of my favorite statue at the Louvre)

Today, 28 days out, all of these doors I've knocked upon & have had unexpectedly opened seem a bit large, ornate, and cause me to peer up at them like some mousey type as if to say, "Oh, um...I was just...um, seeing if the door would open when I knocked, that's all.  Well, then, have a nice evening!" as I high tail it back to familiarity.  

I find that I am reminding myself often the last few days of the last time we went to Europe.  Then too I had this unexpected waffling occur--trepidation over seeing more of the world is no welcomed lover at the midnight door for me--me who jaunted off to Bangkok with a 3 year old with no hesitation, me who has insisted on climbing peaks through lightening storms, me who burns the candle at both ends insatiably, et cetera. Yet, the night before the last trip I was all too happy to give someone else my ticket and intertwine endearingly with complacency, but I boarded as if a character in a script that had to.  Then five weeks later I cried all the way home on the airplane because...well, by then the Hauptbahnhoffs had become my familiarity & choquettes & I didn't feel up for the severing of new tendrils that by then preferred European soil & took some weeks to recover from the transplantation shock.

And here I am again, as if it is the night before some rough, ill-skilled gardener arrives with a bigger pot, with my roots reaching down low to make it through the winter.  It certainly isn't anything words can detail very well, what this trepidation is.  Perhaps to rely on Frost & Shakespeare for a moment comes closest to revealing what it is--"Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted if I should ever come back"--not to say that I won't physically return to Whitefish, but the underlying consequence of way leading onto way is certainly pressing and tangible in ways other than physicality--"We know what we are, but know not what we may be"--that resembles it most closely.  Certainly the walking through doors or down paths results in everything being different than it would have, including most of all, one's self.  & at this moment I like this self very much & so perhaps grieve that her time is coming to a close as way leads onto inner way.  For this reason four months is no longer just four months...it is 120 days of way leading onto way.  For all of us really, yes?