I Dream a Highway Back to You

Walking down the street tonight, I was seized with a metaphysical joy. It was the sense of being-in-time, of being at home with the self, that time to time descends upon us. As I walked, the melodies of Motown classics and The Byrd's stellar Sweetheart of the Rodeo filled my head. Some of the houses on the street were gorgeously decorated for the holidays; one had put lights on a huge tree in the lawn, which looked splendid. I thought about my weekend, its joys and faults: eating extravagant thanksgiving food; singing and playing music in the warmth of an isolated, golden-lit cabin, with the outside splash of black blue sky.

What matters about these occasions isn't that they are perfect. What matters is that they are done.

I thought about my friends. I thought about their lives, what I know of them, how much. How much I will never know. What is told, what is not, what comes out here and there, like an inappropriate comment, or a twitch of the limbs. I wondered at the phenomenon of our friendship(s), and how I could lick them up. I also thought of other people in my life, status ever-pending, status ever-steadying. I even tried to dream of them, but found my will no match for my mind. I thought about my desires, my longings, the acute form that they take. To desire another human being in the aching metaphysical sense, what does it mean? Why them and not another? I thought: it is easy to find something physical in another. All too easy to work from the rash, empirical perspective of the physical, and even to be granted its various satisfactions. The challenge has always been to find something more. It is the old saying I heard from the mouth of a wise man: that anything worth anything takes time, sacrifice, and labour.

I see that as I mature, this task of finding something more becomes deeper, more blanched with worth, weight, and potential obscurity. Sometimes it is when we reach that we do not find. I try to prepare for this possible outcome. I try to take the mysteries and the fleeting moments of clarity in kind.