Road Trip

Last week I journeyed alone by car from Denver to Seattle. I love the contemplative rhythm of very long solo drives. One experiences a shift in perspective when one enters the groundless ground of continuous motion (we're all of us always in motion, actually, but I tend to forget that this is so). In accelerated, detached movement--in a car on the highway--one gets zoetrope glimpses into other vistas, other worlds, other lives, other stories, other illusions of fixity.

I watched the slow, subtle transition of terrains: prairie to mountain range to desert to lush valley to gentle green rolling hills to fertile farmlands to coastal plain. Along the way, rock formations stood as sentinels to remind me that, from their geological perspective, I am little more than a mayfly, merely a spark among sparks.

As I descended from the stark high desert of Southwest Wyoming into the Salt Lake Valley, a realization struck me; not profound but intrinsic: This earth is my home. I am inextricably stitched into it; part of its myriad processes. I am in no way separate from it. I belong here.