A field of corn to my left. Soybeans to my right. The driver’s window is down and the sunroof is open.
The morning sun has barely topped above the cornstalks feathery caps and I am on the road. Exploring. Living. Learning of all the myriads of tales that can be told here, nestled far away from “civilization” as we know it. Far from traffic jams and gang shootings and paparazzi.
It’s where I wave at a complete stranger headed the opposite way on some country road and am rewarded with a smile, a nod, a wave back. A simple communication so deep and fleeting that its peaceful presense is lost on the next rise and dip of the blacktop.
There is life here. And joy. And sadness. And struggle. The fight to survive is the farmer’s tan gilt onto his arm, the worry lines etched into his brow by too many evenings looking out over the fields and wondering if it will be enough. The joy of a young man’s discovery of an arrowhead turned aside by the tractor and found on the fringe of the stalks. The sadness that another day must end and possibilities remain unwritten, flexible, malleable like the hot iron of a blacksmith’s forge.
The sun’s great fire beat down on me today and seared heat through flesh, each beat of its luminous rays upon my cinnamon brow. Sunbeams, uncountable, unending, ring a glorious timbre through my body. Resonating a little too hard, the sun leaves me pink-faced. The changes are overwhelming, turning me loose onto the world a new man, newly born, never the same one moment to the next.
The lucent strings of thought trace spiderwebs within my brain, the spider always at work. Spinning, weaving, never ceasing or easing the struggle of thought with perception, emotion with reality. Each passing thought remaking my inner man anew, forcing me to live the moment, for one is not the same as the next because I am never the same as before.
The drive home is always sad. The sun has sunk and the spiders’ spinnings slow. Time to sleep, remake the world anew upon a lake of dreams inside my mind, dipping a palm under the water and drinking deep of all the mysteries my eyes beheld but which I will only see as the sun slumbers.Tomorrow the journey begins anew, and the trappings familiar.
Faith is my guide, for I know it will be all right.
Hope is my companion, for with him I can never falter and the road will never end.
Wisdom is the line I walk, traveling ever straighter in its windings.
Love is the song to my step, for without love no good can come of this journey. And this is a journey that does not end. It merely pauses, occasionally refreshed, always alive and as infinite as the horizon is far away.
Long may the road be. Light may my feet prove. And glorious the journey upon its inevitable, but marvelous end.
Dialogue