A Day on the Road

I realized something today. I know what chasing after the wind is. I can see how we all seek after the things that we feel we need, and want, and how they destroy us because we can never have them as we think we should. I have come to find that seeking them has a season, and when that is over we need instead to seek to eschew them, realizing that they are not really the things that we need most. Drugs, travel, good times, sex, food, relationships, order, disorder are just distractions. They are attempts to find meaning outside of ourselves, even seeking spirituality is a distraction, when in the end we must realize that we are just imperfect and needy and can never truly know the elation that we seek, that is we can never reach a state of continual elation, at least on this side of Heaven. If Heaven is our home then we will never be content here, but we cannot know Heaven until the days allotted for us here are spent, and we don't know that number...I am not a gifted writer who knows the words to write. The ideas that come to me are not sweet things that I relish or savor stewing them in my mind until they come out. They are burdensome things that gnaw at me, that burn in my hands, but ideas I can't let go of. My writing like my life is a struggle, I am conflicted, wounded, I am not one of the perfect and beautiful. I am not sure that I have any of the answers, except that the questioning becomes a form of knowing, and answering... I drove and drove, through the mountain passes, through the beating rain, fog, periods of sunshine, blinding light, deep darknesses, unable at times to see anything but vague shapes, crazy wrecks of spinning cars, not seen but indicated by skid marks. torn up sod, messed up road signs, uprooted trees. A friend read to me, in the sunlight as I drove, a book by Anne Lamott (titled Grace eventually), who fascinated me by her honest vulnerability,finding joy and life through pain, and emptiness, and loss. All the while I took in the scenery constantly sliding by, remembering and imagining, happy above all to be driving miles and miles of road. Time was meaningless except for the shifting weather and the westward creeping of the light. In the end in the darkness I spoke of the duality of nothingness, the duality of up and down, light and dark, + and -, this and that, past and future until my friend rebelled in laughter at the absurdity of trying to understand the fundamental nature of the universe. I am left alone in the darkness each night to contemplate these things, and I get lost in the infinitude of the infinitesimal, the fractal nature of the universe, attempting to connect a loop, settling at last, in the end,into a state of prayer, a reaching out. I am taken up and led out into it, traveling on and on and on.