Path to Beauty

Path to Beauty

One more step.

The path is steep and steeper still,

You could stop here.

Here, amongst the broken rocks,

Fit the sand of self into the cracks,

Sift down, down into darkness.

One more step-

The path lifts to nothing and nothing still,

You could stop here.

Here, fear will hold you still,

Hope will push you on.

You, must, move – the path will not.

One more step,

Under a sky stretched blue and bluer still

You must stop to look,

Amongst the sand and sun-jagged rocks,

Roots, push, down, lifting leaves to green,

Impossibly, alive, on a path to beauty.

Ruth Everson

Life is a bitch. There are times when one more step, one more morning, one more week, seems impossible. I have sat at the bottom of the dark hole of depression. I have, it seems, spent a lifetime fighting with my own particular demons.

Recently, I have thought a lot about a little story that I read a couple of years ago. I don’t remember its author, so I can’t acknowledge it. A woman is drowning in the middle of a lake. She is holding onto a large rock. From the shore, people are crying out to her to drop the rock.

“Let it go, you’ll be able to swim!”

“I can’t, it’s my rock,” the woman replies.

To the onlookers, the solution is simple, but for those of us who carry the rocks of hurt and fear, it’s hard to let go.

Without hope, we cannot take one more step. My salvation, always, has been the friends and family who have chosen to love me at my most unlovable. Somewhere close to all of us, is someone who feels unlovable. Stand in front of them on the path with your arms outstretched; swim out into the lake. No one should sink on their own.

(The photograph was taken by the talented Lynn Barbour.)