My choice

Yeats, in his more meditative days wrote "The Choice."

"The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out, the toil has left its mark;
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse."

I am at a place where I am forced to choose. And, knowing what I know of myself, right now, on this quiet, humid morning, I know what I've always known.

I choose the life, every single time.
I've tried the other, oh trust me. The work...I work all of the time. Day and night, my mind goes to the work. But my heart, my heart is never there. It is always with the bloody, messy, stained, broken, and glorious life that is put before me every day.
The choice is not an easy one, or maybe it is. I relish freedom, I breathe the air in so deeply these days that it is part of my human diet. I cast out lines for hours, never disappointed that I haven't caught a thing because with me is the breeze, the radiating sun on my skin, the sound of birds, the feel of mud between my toes.
I guess that is why I have always been the wild child. The one who strips down to nothing in the middle of the woods and submerges myself into a cold pool of water. The one who pulls over to the side of the road and writes poems on bank receipts, the one who laughs to the point of pain.
The wild child.
No one envies me, I can tell you that. They see the chaos of my life, they see the children in varying states of skin color and cleanliness, barefoot, eating cookies and perusing the knife collection at the farmer's market, and they must think how crazy is their mama.
Not crazy. I've just made a choice; the empty purse.
Leave the day's vanity to other folks. They'll never have to clean the mud off their feet because their floors are too nice for mud. They'll never have to scramble and scrounge to make a meal.
And they'll never know that the cure for all ills, all evils, all brokenness, is right outside, waiting to heal them.
I choose the life.