CRONE WITH A MACHETE

The Road Less Traveled Still Has a Toll Booth

One of the first books I ever read at the beginning of what we now call the journey—self-help, awakening, personal growth, whatever label you want to slap on it—was The Road Less Traveled.

It was sometime in the mid-eighties, and that book was everywhere. Everybody was reading it. Everybody was talking about choosing the more difficult path, following your own truth, stepping outside convention and becoming the author of your own life.

It sounded magnificent.

It still does.

I have made unconventional choices for most of my life. I became self-employed at twenty, while the people around me were looking for corporate jobs, dependable paychecks, benefits and health insurance.

At the time, I had a roommate who had earned her license as a hairdresser. She spent two years working as an assistant—sweeping floors, shampooing clients, watching, learning and waiting for the moment she would finally move onto the floor and begin building her own clientele.

Just as that moment arrived, she quit.

Her father told her health insurance was more important.

That moment still rings in my head more than forty years later.

Not because she necessarily made the wrong decision. I have no idea what her life would have become had she stayed behind the chair. I have no idea what her life became after she walked away.

It stays with me because it was one of the first times I watched a person stand at the fork in the road and choose.

That is what we all do.

Sometimes we choose possibility over security.

Sometimes we choose security over possibility.

Sometimes we choose freedom over predictability.

Sometimes we choose predictability because freedom feels like standing naked at the edge of a cliff during a thunderstorm.

Neither choice is morally superior.

Neither road is free.

And that is the part people seem to forget.

Free Will Does Not Include Free Shipping

We love talking about free will as though it means we should be able to choose any road we please and then demand that it deliver us safely, comfortably and promptly to the exact destination we imagined.

But free will only gives us the choice.

It does not remove the consequences.

It does not flatten the road, clear the landslides, provide the health insurance, guarantee the retirement account or make certain that the project we poured our heart into will succeed.

Free will does not offer a preview of the invoice.

It just hands us the pen.

I chose self-employment.

I chose uncertainty.

I chose to trust my own hands, instincts, creativity and ability to build something from nothing.

That choice gave me a life that was unmistakably mine.

It gave me freedom. It gave me experience. It gave me a career in beauty, years working with extraordinary people, a garden, an apothecary, businesses, products, healing work, stories and books.

It also gave me instability.

It gave me projects I worked on for months—or years—that fell flat.

It gave me periods of loneliness, financial pressure, exhaustion and the constant knowledge that if something needed to be created, fixed, sold or rescued, I was probably the one who would have to do it.

Now I am sixty-four years old, looking honestly at what comes next.

How long do I want to stand in the garden harvesting plants?

How many hours do I want to stand making potions?

How large do I want the business to become?

Do I want employees?

Do I want to manage people?

Do I want to keep producing more physical products, or do I want to devote more of my life to writing and sharing what I have learned?

And yes, after being self-employed since I was twenty, I do not have a tidy corporate retirement package waiting for me.

There is the toll booth.

Every road has one.

Sometimes it appears immediately.

Sometimes it waits forty-four years before sending the bill.

Every Path Gets Paid for in a Different Currency

The unconventional path is not the only road with consequences.

The person who chooses the corporate job may receive health insurance, paid vacations and a retirement account.

They may also spend decades inside a system they do not love.

The person who chooses marriage may receive partnership, family and companionship. They may also pay in compromise, responsibility and the loss of certain freedoms.

The person who chooses independence may receive autonomy. They may also experience loneliness.

The person who chooses children receives one life.

The person who does not have children receives another.

The person who chooses visibility receives attention and opportunity, along with judgment and scrutiny.

The person who chooses privacy may preserve their peace, but they may also wonder why no one sees them.

Every path gives something.

Every path takes something.

The toll booths simply appear at different places, and they do not all accept the same currency.

One road charges money.

Another charges time.

Another charges freedom.

Another charges certainty.

Another charges comfort.

Another charges belonging.

The fact that a road has become difficult does not necessarily mean you chose incorrectly.

It may simply mean you have arrived at the place where payment is due.

The Road Less Traveled Was Never Paved with Rose Petals

Somewhere along the way, we turned the idea of the road less traveled into a self-help bumper sticker.

Follow your bliss.

Be authentic.

Choose yourself.

Leave the job.

Start the business.

Move across the country.

Become an artist.

Build the dream.

And yes, sometimes you should do exactly that.

But no one tells you the road less traveled is often less traveled because it is overgrown, badly marked and full of things that bite.

There may be no guardrails.

There may be no witnesses.

There may be no applause when you reach the next bend.

You may have to clear the path yourself.

I have been out here for years with a machete, quietly carving a path.

And lately, a whole lot of people coming up behind me are whining about the branches.

The path was never supposed to be comfortable.

It was supposed to get us somewhere.

The unconventional road does not guarantee success simply because you were brave enough to take it.

Courage is not a down payment that forces the universe to approve your mortgage.

You may follow your heart and still fail.

You may hear the call correctly and still misunderstand the timing.

You may build something beautiful and watch it fall flat.

You may work harder than you have ever worked and receive almost nothing in return.

That does not automatically mean your intuition betrayed you.

It does not mean the path was meaningless.

It means you went down a road, learned what was there and reached the place where that particular road ended.

Now you choose again.

Left.

Right.

Back the way you came.

Or perhaps the gentle slope curving somewhere you could not see before.

That is not magical thinking.

That is simply how a life unfolds.

Grief Is Not the Same Thing as Grievance

I have cried about my choices.

I have been lonely.

I have been exhausted.

I have been deeply disappointed.

I have been furious when I worked hard on a project, brought it fully into existence and watched it fall flat.

Honestly, that can piss me off more than a relationship ending.

When a project fails, there is often a moment when I doubt whether I truly heard what my heart was telling me to do. I question the time, energy, money and belief I invested.

But I have never resented the fact that I chose my path.

I have never needed to make someone else’s road wrong so that mine could make sense.

There is a difference between grief and grievance.

Grief says:

This hurt.

I lost something.

I did not understand how much this would cost.

I need to mourn what I thought would happen.

Grievance says:

This hurt, so someone must be guilty.

Somebody owes me.

Someone else must be blamed, punished or humiliated so that I do not have to sit alone with the reality of my own life.

We now live in a culture that is very good at turning grief into content and very bad at allowing grief to become wisdom.

So grief hardens.

It becomes grievance.

Grievance needs an enemy to keep it warm.

And social media will happily provide one.

Everybody Wants a Refund on Life

This is what I see every day now.

People drawing lines.

People choosing sides.

People pointing fingers.

People who chose the unconventional path blaming those who chose the conventional one.

People who chose stability resenting those who took risks.

People blaming another generation, another political party, another gender, another class, another worldview or another group of strangers for the fact that their own lives did not unfold exactly as promised.

And I get it.

Life is rough.

There are days when I have had enough.

There are days when I look around and think, “Fuck humanity. I am done.”

I am not floating above any of this in a cloud of spiritual perfection.

I live here too.

I know what disappointment feels like.

I know what it is to wonder whether all that work, hope and conviction were worth it.

But when situations became rough, uncertain or financially frightening, I did not immediately put up a GoFundMe and decide everyone else was responsible for paying for my failed project, my poor timing, my choices or the fact that life had not gone according to plan.

That does not mean there is shame in asking for help.

There are real emergencies.

There are accidents, illnesses, disasters and circumstances that can flatten a person through no fault of their own.

Community matters.

We are supposed to help one another.

But help is different from entitlement.

A crisis is different from treating the public as the insurance policy for every risk you willingly took.

Sometimes you start the business and it fails.

Sometimes you move across the country and hate it.

Sometimes you follow your dream and discover the dream cannot support you.

Sometimes the thing you believed would work simply does not.

That is painful.

It may be humiliating.

It may require you to ask for support, take another job, sell something, change direction or begin again.

But it does not automatically mean the rest of the world owes you reimbursement for having exercised your free will.

You do not get to keep all the freedom of the unconventional choice while sending the invoice for its consequences to everyone else.

At some point, we have to stop treating difficulty as proof that someone violated the terms and conditions of our incarnation.

There were no terms and conditions.

There was no guarantee.

There was a road.

There was a choice.

There was a consequence.

There was another choice.

That is life.

We seem to have created a refund department for existence, and everyone is standing in line without a receipt.

They want their youth back.

Their time back.

Their money back.

Their marriage back.

Their freedom back.

Their career back.

Their innocence back.

They want to exchange the life they chose for the imaginary one they believe would have been easier.

But we do not know what the unchosen road would have cost.

We only see its entrance.

We do not see its toll booths.

You Are Allowed to Choose Again

Taking responsibility for your choices does not mean you are sentenced to them forever.

That is another distortion.

You are allowed to change your mind.

You are allowed to admit the road you chose no longer fits.

You are allowed to leave the job, close the business, end the relationship, begin again, move home, move away, slow down or become someone you could not have imagined at twenty.

Changing direction is not necessarily failure.

Sometimes the road has simply ended.

Sometimes you learned what you came there to learn.

Sometimes the rug gets pulled out because there is something else to do.

That does not mean every disappointment is secretly a blessing wrapped in glitter and tied with an angelic bow.

Some things are simply painful.

Some things are unfair.

Some things are tragic.

Some people are genuinely harmed by forces outside their control.

But even then, there comes a point where we must decide what we will create from what remains.

That is where our power lives.

Not in pretending we controlled everything that happened.

Not in blaming ourselves for every storm.

And not in building an altar to the person or system we believe ruined our lives.

Our power lives in what we choose next.

The Machete Is for Clearing the Path, Not Hacking at Each Other

I am at a place in my life where I am asking how to use my voice in a way that helps rather than adds to the battle.

That does not mean becoming soft-headed.

It does not mean pretending everyone is right.

It does not mean wrapping everything in some “we are all one” bullshit while people avoid truth, accountability, harm and consequence.

Real unity does not require the abandonment of discernment.

A bridge cannot be built by denying there is a canyon.

The bridge begins when we stop throwing rocks at the people standing on the other side long enough to look at the ground beneath our own feet.

The purpose of the machete is not to hack people apart.

It is to cut through the vines, stories, resentments, propaganda and accumulated bullshit that keep us from seeing one another clearly.

I do not need the person who chose the conventional road to regret it.

I do not need the person with the pension to be miserable.

I do not need the person who stayed married to secretly envy my freedom.

I do not need another woman’s choices to validate mine.

I chose my road.

I paid for it.

I was also richly rewarded by it.

At sixty-four, I am choosing again.

I am moving toward writing because I have lived.

I have something to say.

I have spent decades learning through beauty, plants, business, failure, intuition, love, disappointment, healing and the strange, magnificent brutality of being alive.

Now I want to share what I have learned.

Not because I have escaped the consequences of my choices.

Because I have survived long enough to understand them.

I chose freedom.

I paid in uncertainty.

I chose self-employment.

I paid in the absence of guarantees.

I chose creation.

I paid in failed projects.

I chose to trust my own path.

And I was paid in sovereignty, beauty, experience and a life that belongs unmistakably to me.

I may choose another road tomorrow.

That is also free will.

But I will not stand at the toll booth screaming that someone else owes the fare.

The third dimension is rough.

Get a helmet.