I was 16 or 17 when I bought the Indigo Girls’ CD Swamp Ophelia and first fell in love with this track, The Wood Song.
It’s a pretty universal desire to want to know what the future holds, and when the present is unpleasant, the future is a wonderful place in which to lose myself. I’ve spent plenty of time fantasizing about what my future would look like, and now that I’m “here” in that future, I’m pretty happy it didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped. If someone had told me at 16 years old what the next 20 years would hold, I wouldn’t have been able to believe it. Certainly I wanted to know, and there have been times when I thought I did know. But it was the not knowing that got me to where I am today. It was the not knowing that allowed me to make mistakes, fail, learn, and own the lessons.
Living in the future is an act of fear. Living in the present is an act of faith. That’s where I’ve been and continues to be where I need to go.
