The Innkeeper

A Poem

At sun's arise
to guests' wide eyes
the rays dance on the island
and seagulls glide,
the inkeep's pride! 
His jewel—he says, in silence. 

"This view is mine. 
The years go by 
yet here I stand, performing.
As passersby move on, I sigh
and make the beds for morning." 

At setting sun his work is done
for now, but he knows when
the masquerade begins again—
for them, as he lays dormant. 

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Whenever I’m on vacation, I dream of abandoning it all and opening a bed-and-breakfast somewhere beautiful. It seems like the perfect life. You live in a place that people travel to in order to relax and enjoy the view. There must be at least some downtime during the day to take it all in. And your clients are vacationers—at least most of them are pleasant to deal with, right?

It mustn’t be a bad gig, but I wonder if this fairytale scenario gets boring after a while. A vacation can’t last forever. After a month or so of the same, your dream job just becomes your life.

It’s the paradox of existence. Life has a funny way of giving us exactly what we ask for, yet every time, we continue to want what we can’t have.

Are the bed-and-breakfast owners of the world happy?

Perhaps, on average, they’re happier than the salary-workers of the world. But if so, this is only because they had the initiative to hold their lives in their own hands and take what they wanted.

If contentment really is a state of mind, you don’t need a storybook ending or a quaint house on the water in order to have it. You just need to let go and live.

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Thanks for reading, and I’m sorry that posting has been sporadic. John and I got married—but that’s a story for another time.

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