Planting seeds in ice

It seems my perambulations have been longer, perhaps riskier as the new year has started. This is not due to any resolutions. I don't do resolutions. I make promises and commitments. But as I have had, I suppose, a little more time, and much more anxiety than I had expected at this juncture of my "vacation," I have tried a couple of new routes, or at least paths I could not have taken at any other time.

For example, I have walked twice on an expanse of highway under construction. Normally this would have been bustling with people and machines, and I certainly would not be allowed up there. But one walk was during freezing cold, and another was on New Years Day, so area was abandoned and looking as forlorn as abandoned things are in winter.

please don't nod in time

to my melancholy words

agony should be no tune

you can shut off so easily

i'm not a channel to be changed

On another walk, I found myself further down I-30, under an overpass, and some mischievous spirit in me thought it would be fun to climb up so that I could be in the middle of the highway. Maybe an interesting picture could be had. It wasn't, but I did manage to nearly bust my keister trying to get down. I wonder what sort of metaphor is sliding down thirty feet of cold concrete.

I have felt a bit wistful about all this. On Monday, I get back to my paying job, and I've felt no little anxiety that my walks will be shorter, less adventurous, less picturesque. What I had hoped to accomplish in terms of my own journey may not have happened. I cannot tell at this juncture because I have been planting seeds in ice: it feels futile, but I have to have faith it isn't. Ice melts, I'm told.