Is This Way a Map or Is It a Story?

Knowing and learning,
every morning it fills my sails.
These waters are full of shouts and sights.
I note, I hear,
Not a path or a way.
I hear my keel gliding
drawn on by magnetic poles and stars.
And I ask, “What will the future bring?”
Part of the answer–
a safe harbor–
and another part of the answer
wants to be
just shell-seeking on any beach.
We take what we are given,
a whole way, a whale road
where the sea is wild and cold,
clouds and icebergs.
Either answer requires our attention,
alert to the unsafe,
awake to the confounding of all our straight lines,
where failing to heed this aimless reality
can mean oblivion.
Some days, most days I hope,
we sail the course that we have set,
our own desire paths and not the wake of fate.
Other days our course might be reset
by circumstance.
Rolling with the tide,
keeping on by tacking back,
those may be the only ways ahead.
This begs another question,
“Is this way a map
or is it a story?”
They are very different things.