Kind of going through some old writing...

Well, I'm looking for some documentation on OpenVPN I wrote for a friend. Below are some things I found instead. Both of which I wrote a few years ago in a different quadrant of the patchwork quilt that is my life. The poem is something I wrote for a person I was dating at the time, but I certainly wish that my son could see himself the way I see him. Somethings just seem impossible to express. We only fail when we stop trying though.

-------------------------------------------------------

-Through my eyes -

If you could see you through my eyes,
You would see the joy that’s inside,
In every way you touch my life,
You would see what I see in you,
You would see how much I love you.


-------------------------------------------------------

One night while sitting on the kitchen floor of the unfinished kitchen with P a very interesting conversation ensued….

P was discussing a story she had written in 2nd grade the previous year. She was telling me that she had also drawn a picture to go with it. She said she really enjoyed drawing. She then drew her picture again. It was a picture of a giant sundae (a statue in her story) with a huge spoon in it. P was very proud of her drawing.

She then started drawing on the other side of the page. She drew chaos. It was a veritable maelstrom of colors in a widely varying circular patterns all drawn continually on top of each other. I told her that it looked very pretty. And it did. She said, "That’s what grown ups say when they don't want to hurt your feelings. I made something for my dad and he said that's nice P, but he just didn’t want to hurt my feelings." Hmmmm.

I then said to P, "Well, your drawings are very colorful. Your swirls look to me like what I would envision the emotion of confusion would look like. It reminds me of confusion. Very chaotic, intertwining, and not being able to tell one thing from another." I told her, "Some of the best known artist are able to capture emotions with their pictures and the people that look at them can FEEL that emotion. That is what your picture did for me, it made me think of confusion." She beamed. She said, "I'm not a very good artist though." I said, "Well, it takes practice. Like all things, if you enjoy doing it, then the more you do it, the better you will get."

P's attention was then captured by a bead on the floor. She started pushing it down one of the troughs between the square tiles in the floor. P said at that point, "This is my life. I just keep going straight. I'm not able to turn left or right. I have no choices. I just keep going straight."

Putting my finger on a point in another trough, I asked P, "Would you like to get to here?" She said, "Yes, but I keep going straight."

I then said, "Well, you do have a choice. You can keep going straight until you reach this junction, and then you have a choice. You can go left, right or straight. It just may take a while to get there." P thought about that for a minute, as was I, trying to keep ahead of her. I thought of Robert Frost's poem 'The Road Less Traveled.'

Gaining what I thought was a little inspiration I said, "You know, this is very much like what one of my favorite poets described in his poem 'The Road Less Traveled'. He started with "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood." This is a little like what you were saying. You keep going straight for right now, but one day you be at a place where you can make a choice. Robert Frost then said that he was sorry he could not travel both because he was one traveler. So he looked at both of them very carefully because he wanted to make the right choice for him. He liked the one that was "grassy and wanted wear" because it looked like it was less traveled. He also said that knowing how way leads on to way that he would probably never come back to that point so he knew that he had to make a good choice."

P looked up at me and said, "I want to take the road that has the most people. And I want to take the high road, not the low road." I told her, "Well, at the point that you get to make your choice, you will have lots of reasons for choosing one road over another. Robert Frost wanted the road less traveled, and when he looked back he was very happy with his choice. Someone else, like you, may come to the same point and say, 'I want the higher road.' And therefore at the same intersection, many people will have many different wants and will choose a path for many different reasons, all based on what they want."

At this point I figured it was a good point to leave P to her thoughts so I suggested that we go upstairs so that I could find her mom, and P could get ready for bed.