Arise and Go

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree…And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow…for always night and day, I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. – The Lake Isle of Innisfree, William Butler Yeats

In a moment of pause on a cool, grey morning, I noticed how fast the clouds traveled. Half-billowed by rain, they did not linger, but moved at their brisk pace across the sky. Had I not been still, I would not have noticed their curious speed.

More often, I am the one who is moving fast. As such, I spend a considerable amount of time seeking balance and rest. Most of the busy I’ve enjoyed. Seeing little ones grow, marking time in school drop-offs and pick ups and play dates and activities, traveling to be with family, working at jobs I’ve mostly found rewarding. For me, there was always a tipping point, a need to re-center. For the most part, corrections were small and balance easily restored. But the collective toll of the last few years, the weight of grief and the keeping up with life, ushered in this overdue period of rest and reflection.

I remember reading Innisfree as a teenager, one of my favorite poems from Yeats. I did not know then the comfort it would bring now. The influence of Thoreau’s Walden echoes. Thoreau went to the woods “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” He wanted to learn what nature had to teach. Yeats may not have moved to Innisfree, but it inspired him, as did Walden, and Yeats’ poem inspired me.

I will arise and go now. I will choose a place where it is quieter. For that is when peace comes, even as life moves fast around. It is a place in the heart and the mind as much as it is by a distant shore, though the sound of lake water lapping sure does help to quiet the mind, as does observing the morning clouds.