1The Road – Arizona
2 The Road – Arches Nat’l Park
3 The Road – Arches Nat’l Park
4 The Road – Arizona
The road – some value the swift movement of traveling from point of origin to established destination; here, travel is not about what you encounter along your distance – travel is about getting ‘there.’ Robert Frost and Scott Peck, on the other hand, each refer to the road less traveled for what the road can reveal of the world and for how that road can grow us as we encounter new frontiers. Jack Kerouac, in his novel, ‘On the Road,’ refers to a life orientation of meeting, new, upcoming road – what we discover moving over it and how we grow as the road challenges us. That road and what we do along it becomes our narrative, our less traveled road.
Images from the road ….
Listening to – Chuck Berry’s ‘Route 66.’
Quote to Consider – “If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious.”
In My Back Pocket - Photography 
Our lives are also coloured by the paths we chose not to travel
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Robert Frost
The end of one of my favourites of his The Road Not Taken. Such a slow wistful poem, looking back on choices. You first picture reminds me of the film Vanishing Point, one of the great road movies.
Jim
Hey there, Jim:
I’m noting my ramble of words, here, something that may leverage more precise meter and form … one of these days. Good!
The path or paths not taken – do you suppose these season our lives? Do they colour our lives and remind us to live as well and as fully as we can upon the road taken? Do we fall prey to the workings of restless imagination in considering all that might have been? Is the needed discipline that of remaining present and faithful to the path we’re on? Or, is it that we need to find our best contentment with the path we’re on – are we to grow where we’ve planted ourselves? And, do we honour our choice(s) – path travelled?
Life’s frontiers are always in front of us and always hold choice’s divergence – one way or the other (or the other).
Vanishing Point – I first watched it on a summer Saturday night as a teen; it now holds elements that make it forerunner to the present day series, ‘The Transporter.’ But, Vanishing Point has a searcher feel – something akin to what ‘The Road Less Travelled’ is about, living Life and confronting what Life holds on one’s own terms. Vanishing Point must be corollary to Frost’s ‘Road Less Travelled,’ highlighting the integrity and personal code for Life on the road of a traveller travelling his own path or road; the title itself highlights the point of disappearance when the traveller moves beyond the perception of who last took note of him. You have written a poem about what’s on the other side of the horizon … a vanishing point concept.
The movie exemplifies a key element of the traveller’s code – ‘my’ path is mine and you have no business interfering with it; there’s elemental primacy associated with trekking along one’s own path, something many (others) may not possess as a Life option. And, the movie’s title presents a twist; it may be about the absence of frontier and the possibility of choices presented by diverging paths; we travel along routes others have established for us; the traveller is no longer on foot – he reclines in a supercharged, maneuverable, wheel chair (named Challenger) and moves at a speed that places him at destinations long before his feet could ever have carried him there.
Likely, the Road Less Travelled is best greeted ‘on foot.’
“And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.” – Wendell Berry
There are indeed choices we do not make that colour our paths. Definitely, slow, wistful and about the enduring value and possession of what has transpired. 😉