The Path Not Taken

Posted by Russ Devan (New Hanover, United States) on 12 December 2008 in Landscape & Rural and Portfolio.

This is the beginning of another round of images that I shot last October in Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

When I came upon this scene leading away from a mountaintop vista, it reminded me of Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken", one of my favorites. I wonder what I would have found had I walked down this path instead of the one that I did choose.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

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, 1916

"The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both."
- Zen Buddhist Text

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