by Catherine Nickerson

Created on: February 25, 2009

Mending Wall, by Robert Frost is full of the magic that can be found in free loving relationships with those around us.
The natural earth forces "That sends the frozen-ground-swell" are a far greater influence on the boundaries created by man than even the hunter who moves only stones to unearth his prey.Nature will destroy the walls we create between us and those around us more surely than man will.

The neighbors who walk the wall use magic spoken spells in their mending efforts. "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" they say together. The mending of the wall is a ritual repeated yearly in the hopes that what is spoken may have some invisible effect on the broken parts. Just as our yearly attempts to mend our relationships can become repeated rituals of spoken spells in the hopes that the words might have some magical effect on the relationship. "Sorry I haven't called, thought about you all of the time, though."

Are we walling our lives in or walling others out? What doesn't love the wall we put up in pastures? "I could say 'Elves' to him,/ But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather/ He said it for himself." Elves, who are magical creatures found in the pastures, can wreak havoc on the lives of humans. The elves in our modern ideas of life are too many to list. But would any wall we have built between us and our neighbors keep out the elves? And, more importantly, should it? And do you want your neighbor ignoring the elves in our lives?

Mending the wall is futile. We seem the "old-stone savage armed" when we keep our walls mended. You know the friend, who prefers Myspace, Facebook, and emails to actually dealing with people. "People suck," they say. They may as well tattoo, "Good fences make good neighbors" on their palms.

Let's not be savages, let's embrace the magic of this world as experienced through wall free relationships.

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