The
Beauty of Boundaries
She
felt light and bright
most
of the time,
the
warmth of love hovered over,
within
most of her relationships
and
friendships.
But
sometimes
she
was asked why
her
love differed in intensity.
There
was at least one other
who
felt her love like snow
an
icy covering
blocking
the warmth she knew to be beneath.
Boundaries
lined her way, her life,
happy
ones that helped her to see
the
limitations that were good, right, honourable,
guiding
her to love appropriately,
enabling
her to dance freely,
to
see the light, the beauty
of
friendship
in
sparkling greens and soft mauves
and
the purity of white
to be
found
when
these borders were in place.
The
demarcation line became clear
for
this one
desiring
to be pleasing to
the one
and only one who had created her
and
everything else.
She
did not feel restricted, restrained
but
rather content,
knowing
that true happiness
comes
from understanding
and
remaining within the boundaries
drawn
by the hand of the all-knowing.
There
was a truth recently understood
that
should she choose
to go
outside her own boundaries
she
would invade
the
territory of another.
In "Mending Wall," Robert Frost offers a contrasting view:
ReplyDeleteSomething there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."