I’m road tripping. My phone is loaded with podcasts and I’m listening to wise words and thinking deep thoughts in the sanctuary of my Ford Escape. Sometimes I turn the audio off, listen to the silence and let wisdom saturate.
I’m free. Constrained by the vehicle, and gravity, and other natural laws that keep me safely in the seat of my vehicle, yet free in the bliss of solitude and a wandering mind.
My camera gear is in the back, and I scan the scenery for things that capture my attention. A blue lake surrounded by spring-stick trees and white clouds bubbling above causes an involuntary “oh!” to escape from my lips when I turn a corner. There’s no safe place to stop and shoot so I store the image in my mind and drive on.
Occasionally, I pull off the road and pick up my phone and dictate some thoughts that I have to get out of my mind. I’ll chew on them later when I have an opportunity to wrangle them in the form of the written word.
It’s always the words: the spoken word coming through the speakers, the words tumbling in my mind when I sit in silence, the ones I dictate, the ones I’ll later write. It’s the words that feed me best and satisfy me the most. It’s the words that give me inspiration to craft other words into sentences and paragraphs and create a work. It’s through words that the Divine speaks to the part of me that hungers for the sound of the still, small voice.
I find it hard to be in this world sometimes, more often of late, but this, right here and right now, feels like I belong in this space.
