Weekly Wide-Awake: Traveler There Is No Road

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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Weekly Wide-Awake: Traveler There Is No Road

Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
From Antonio Machado’s, “Traveler There Is No Road“

Just keep walking. Just keep walking. Just keep walking.

I think about Nemo’s advice to “just keep swimming.” I think about leaping and trusting in nets. I think about rainbows with pots of gold. I think about the fact many roads start as desire paths. I think about the truth of a message communicated across languages.

We are all travelers and our paths are our own. Born into original grace. Curious and wise in miraculous ways. We learn to crawl, stand, and walk. Breaking it down makes it all seem so simple, but it is not. The journey to taking our first steps is not easy, and it does not get any easier once we are up and walking.

Faith. Trust. Courage. Vision. Hope. Strength. Curiosity. Steel. Paths are made of all that. E.L. Doctorow explains, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Though he said this about writing, I think it applies to our life path as well. Our paths can feel like driving at night in the fog. Our headlights might be dim. We might even get a flat tire. We might be hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. It is then that we must remember to just keep driving. Just keep walking. One breath at a time. One step at a time. We can make our whole trip that way. (The good news is life is about both dark and light.)

I write this mostly as a reminder to myself. As a traveler at heart, I have seen darkness and light. I have run out of gas around midnight 30 minutes outside of Missoula, Montana after seeing a Russian Circus. I have found the Southern Cross on the South Island of New Zealand. I have seen the fires as Ogoh-ogoh burn during Nyepi in Bali. The darkness abounds in each. The path is unclear. The lesson is to keep walking.

Read Weekly Wide-Awake: Traveler There Is No Road Here