Week two: in Boulder

I am just winding down from a day on the road.  I am in Boulder CO staying with a wonderful fella named David. He belongs to Mary Anne.

Today was rough. Not for any physical reason or any particular animosity, but there was a pervasive air of dissonance in the car. I must be getting worse at traveling as I grow older.  I seem to have little patience and even less generosity. My travel companion is a great girl. Somewhere in the works we took a wrong turn around the communication bend. Either we sit in silence or we both try and take over the space. This leads to a crash of ego, and more silence.  There has been no real provocation on either part, just a since of not belonging.  It’s like that sesame street song: “one of these things is not like the other; one of these things doesn’t belong.” Only we keep changing what the other things around us are so it changes who doesn’t belong. So far it has been me, but for the rest of the trip I think it may be her. We spent two days packing her house and two days with her family and a day with her best friend, and now it is on to the people I know. I am not sure that this is the best match. It is funny how a mutual friend can appreciate two people so much and yet those people don’t mesh well at all.  Sarah and I have a mutual friend, Molly Wilson, who suggested that we would make good friends and went so far as to try to play match maker, but the reality is that we have no true connections other than the love of arts and the appreciation of Molly.  The rest of the trip will go simultaneously slow and fast. I want it to be over. Yet I hate to wish days of my life away, so it is time to make the best of what I have.  And since what I have is a week in the south west, it is time to break out the spurs.

There was this storm today that rivaled most in my memory.  As we crossed the plains of Colorado the change in highway yielded a change in direction and set before us was a wall of weather, dark as the coming of night. Highway 76 became the path to certain doom in the literary since: passing through to inclimate weather.  Yet a turn in the road showed a lighter spot in the cloud wall that moved directly over the road and formed a passage through the down pour. Like a divine separation of the waters. We did encounter the rain for a passing moment which was to create the since of austere breathtaking grandeur that awaited us on the other side of Mother Nature’s crop fodder. The rain from the storm slowed us down to a crawl washing us of conscious thought. Concentrated on staying on the road and in a straight line became my reason for life in those moments.

As the rain broke the sky beyond held the colors and shapes of a thousand dreams. I was taken to a state of infancy where my immediate life was the focus of breath and thought, and this was focused on the sky. The sun setting to the right shone a beam of red like a flashlight in the dark, starting at a point and widening to encompass the breadth of my vision. As the clouds mimicked the suns colors the now wet road was a mirror to the colors and like a Rorschach test commanded me to see that of myself in it.  The fold of the horizon beckoned us without hurry to join it and see where the vanishing point found rest for all lines. Time is not a thing for nature. Time is a way to compare. And in nature there is no similar, only new.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 6:09 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.