![]() One leg was left to hang awkwardly useless. At an early age he was crippled by polio, a frightening epidemic then sweeping the country. Playing off the poem that day, he talked about just swinging through, a skill he had to learn to keep up with the other kids. We never referred to him by his first name. I hope you too have one of those teachers in your life. I can still remember maybe ten of those metaphors. So often my professor would frame his stunning speeches with a guiding metaphor, often drawn from his wide love of literature. ![]() I once had a professor who gave an amazing talk, where the anchoring metaphor was this very boy from Frost’s poem, swinging down from the tops of spindly, bending birch trees. Seemed like I could imagine anything up there, maybe even starting all over again, maybe repairing everything wrong in my little world. I loved being up there, perched at the top of these magnificent trees, away from it all, looking out over the fields of melons and cattle and sheep. Once to the top I could see for miles, I thought. I remember climbing the towering eucalyptus trees that surrounded our home. So was I once myself a swinger of birches. Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, Maybe we can make things better next time around.īut then, in the meantime, the poet remembers, as a boy, high in the birch trees, We’d like to come back later and start all over. I can relate, can’t you? We’d all like to get away for awhile. Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebsįrom a twig’s having lashed across it open. Consider Robert Frost’s marvelous poem “Birches”:Īnd life is too much like a pathless wood These are all metaphors for the slings and arrows of life.As the lockdown lingers, nerves fraying at the edges a bit, I am trying to imagine just swinging through. You get sharp branches and spider webs in your face.
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