WITH LOVE FROM THE ROAD
Two thousand one hundred and eleven days sober.
Fifty-eight days on the road.
From yesterday into today: three live hawk, four live mule deer, oodles of living breathing frolicking cows and horses; four dead fox, two dead coyote, two dead porcupine, two dead raccoon, three dead deer.
One powerful Buffalo Effigy.
The sky infinite and limitless, like the ocean herself; the other day, an enormous cloud almost swallowed the sun but decided to make it a luminous belly button instead.
Some days, my heart says: I can’t take in anymore beauty. There is simply no space for me to hold anything else.
There is more of course, and everything feels like it is moving within me, surrounding me.
Moving within us, surrounding us.
Then together, as the road travels along side, we breathe a few slow breaths, the ones that roll deep like thunder through a wandering being and I understand that somehow, a heart can always create more space.
This missive has experienced numerous stops and starts (like me, like you) and in fact has gathered an impressive layer of dust while Win-dog and I think and feel and drive and drive and feel and think all the way to the ocean and then away from it heading in the direction of another ocean.
When I started this particular piece of writing, we were keeping pace with one another, listening to the air breathe long stories of the next season soon coming and here it is, in our faces, the leaves a most colorful poem while I unpack everything to pull out the cooler weather wear and repack it all like a puzzle all over again.
Time works like strange magic on the road and we do our best to remain open to all of it, to whatever comes—and as the chorus of dog snores and rain showers braid themselves together around me like a warm hug, just about the two truest things I can write right now is 1) how even though I have left home, home has not left me and 2) everywhere I go, there I am.
This adventure was never about running away from anything and always about moving towards something I still have no name and no description or definition for and each (and every) way I turn, there I am—and so too is fear, resiliency and so too are all of my many multi-dimensional personality parts.
Music up, windows down and a constantly changing landscape are the perfect environment for memories to flicker about, zig zagging through the sculpture of my brain and the magnificent mechanics of my heart—I am older now, I think to myself, and more able to soften some of the sharper rememberings with tenderness and this is what practice is as we drive and drive and feel and think some more, the spirit of my mother a firm presence the farther east we traveled is now fading to a slight shimmer as we drive north, retracing our steps and then soon after that, head all the way west.
As it happens, something is happening and it's the kind of something happening that is too young and too free and too much of itself to box in with any words I can write.
Thank you holy land.
Thank you sacred water.
Thank you glorious sky.