There are places in our life when we can look back into our own eyes and at our skin and the age we were back then and remember exactly what had just happened and we can wish that at that exact moment when the eyes looked like that, when there was still time to prevent further pain - before the broken blood vessels from screaming in pain, before the crows feet that suddenly came when just yesterday you were so young - that exact day we should have walked away, turned the corner, changed the path we were on, called upon the 'Bold Forces' to save us - and how it rips the heart apart to know how much pain we knowingly chose to continue walking with. Herein lies the true nature of regret and remorse. And if you feel this, you are not alone. You are never alone. Love to you and love to me and love to all of us who know and will know this feeling.
From, "The Soul is a river ~ The River Has a Soul," by C.P. Estes:
But I had already been naked in rivers
and crossed land over ice lakes in winter,
and been baptized in creeks,
...and the dam could not say enough
to convince me, for I knew the mightiness
belonged to open water.
How could a dam endear me to its metal heart?
for when I looked behind me, all the water
was held up now, as though by robbers,
in not a lake, for it had not trees,
nor fauna grown up in the water,
nor flowering wands anywhere near,
nor fish in hundred year old holes,
but just a huge holding-tank of still water only.
How could a dam endear me to its metal heart?
for it had made the river
no longer churn properly,
no longer throwing itself into the air with joy
making rainbows,
no longer eddying.
And when I listened, there were wrong notes and
more so, missing notes, to the sound of water there.
The color of the water was not right, too cloudy-eyed
as with a fever, and the smell,
the right smell in the air was missing
at this endless asphalt cistern.
I learnt at the dam about building things
over wild things,
about holding wild things back,
and I learnt from the dam
how to never speak ebullience
but rather only on occasion, sometimes letting out,
yet only in the smallest measured ways,
and always over a controlled spillway…
just some little tiny bit
of something,
but never passion, never vanguard words.
And thus at the dam, I could see
it was meant to teach to hold the tongue,
and to wait and wait
till the gates were opened just a hair,
and only by authority’s say so,
and then just to let a modicum
of the most precious through,
leaving behind all the rest of the real water
and her children,
to rage or writhe or wither.