My favorite frosty is still at Wendy's. However, Roberts closing in.

I recently read a small autobiographical summary of Robert Frost’s life.
He had a difficult one, a heartbreaking one. He lost many of his children and his wife in tragic ways. And he lived.

By reading Robert Frost by Philip L. Gerber and gaining a little more insight into Robert’s poetry, I believe he did something I am familiar with to help him cope with his loss. It’s important to talk about it because it is so small and often overlooked. I believe it’s why so many people turn to unhealthy vices, because they do not know there is a better way.

Back then, I doubt there were many books on how to cope with traumatic loss. Yet he did cope with it, not just through his writing. His poetry was one of those healthy outlets. Art is always a beautiful vice. But it is what he did before the words that saved him.

If poetry was a medium, then micro joys were his muse. Not just pen to paper, it was his muse that really saved him.

Micro Joys

This poem embodies that idea. Frost survived devastation by ingesting the small bits of beauty along the road he traveled. He took the time to inhale whatever goodness he could find. He didn’t care if it seemed strange. He only cared in that moment that absorbing anything outside the terror of his reality would preserve his mind.

And it did.

When you read this poem, you are reading what it feels like to be a human fractured by trauma, someone gathering tiny fragments of beauty and peace wherever they can, even as they continue walking a long, dark road with no way around it.

Frost lived to be eighty eight, passing only from surgical complications, not because he gave up, not because the evil he endured won. He lived a long life because he refused to stop coping.

Tiny joys.

He stopped for them because he had to.

What I believe he was really saying
in the last verse, was saying something like this:

“The horse thinks it is strange that I have stopped to stare at these woods. They are dark and deep, but lovely.
But I must stop. I need to take it in because I have years of hardship and grief ahead of me.
I must take this moment in, or I will be consumed by what’s behind me and petrified of what is yet to come. Either leaving me stuck or doomed.
So I stop and rest, and remember that there is beauty along the way.”

For you and me, we beautiful souls who have a long, dark road ahead and a painful one behind us, stop and look around.
Wait in the quiet moments. Watch the woods fill with snow.
Find something each day that you can call good.
Then keep going until you find the next good thing.

Survive it by catching the life rafts in a mason jar. By stopping and smelling the roses. By looking at and touching earth.

You are worth survival.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Frost stopped in the middle of life’s hardest winters to notice beauty and let it steady him.
That is what I want to teach my children to practice too.
To stop. To see. To remember that joy still exists. In their pain, sorrow, fear. My goal is to teach them…
No. My job is to SHOW them how to find the joy amid their pain. It is there. God laid it out. You just have to keep your eyes open to see it.

With love and all my hope for anyone going through it

Sincerely,

This thawing Mama