Deliberate Intentions

May 19

On northward approach I went. The highway Gene had suggested kept me flowing on up/down elevations and the repetition of eroded mountains passed the day. A thin blanket of cloud remained in the sky, but it withheld its rain and kept the temperature a bit higher than it had been in days. By nighttime the land had become less extreme in its angles and would go by more smoothly.

May 20

By schedule I figured I'd be leaving Kentucky by tomorrow, but had no intention to rush. As evening began to close the day I stopped at some highway exit restaurants to search out a meal. I leaned my bicycle against a restaurant's stucco wall and sat down to roll a cigarette. A lady in fast food uniform came out and sat on the curb, lit her own cigarette, then cautiously meandered toward me. She asked if I was traveling and I introduced her to the trip. When she'd lived in Florida, she told me, she'd worked at a vegan/vegetarian place and had some friends who'd done something similar. She introduced herself to me as Cheryl.

“I love to meet people like this,” she said with a quiet smile, motioning to my bicycle. “I'm not very talkative, but if I see someone traveling or something I always talk to them and say everything right away, but then...well, what to say now?”

It was a meeting between two shy people who sensed familiarity, but both of us were unaware how to share the dialogue in our minds. Fortunately the most valuable things don't need words to be expressed and I perceived her kind sensitivity intimately in the silence between sentences.

“Hey, are you hungry? I get off in ten minutes and could bring you some food. Are you vegetarian or would anything be okay?” Excitement had entered her soft voice.

Every act of charity I encounter and the qualities of those who choose to provide it overwhelms me more each day. In some things appreciation may diminish with added quantity, but I find the opposite true of freely offered charity. These people themselves are loving kindness manifest, the voluntary instrument of absolute good will. Every altruistic act I've received is carved into me as a testament to the holiness of humanity and by each act this holiness approaches its whole.

God's perfect face shined onto me through her patient inquisitive eyes: seeking, giving, becoming good will. Love, exceeding and bountifully blessing, reflected on me from within the window of her eyes, a pristine symmetry of universal truth was mirrored for an instant in the imperfect person.

Under the changing sky Cheryl soon returned with a feast in a bag. She passed it on to me and, astounded by its weight, I thanked her, looking over it with gaping eyes. Each of us still with so much to say but no way to say it attempted to talk a minute more until her ride had arrived. The sun fell now below the horizon and the glow of evening began to fade. Then, having gotten into the car, waving goodbye they drove away and she was gone.

May 21

Riding through morning I stayed along a highway which looked to stretch flat and long to Kentucky's north border. It was a bright day. I rode on in the little shoulder singing to myself beneath the still blue sky. Surrounding fields dashed with lines of crops and little streams hinted at the Midwestern heartland.

Time passed in a haze of subconscious thought and flowing lands. As the sun crept west I found myself in traffic's evening rush. I listened to each vehicle pass. The pitch of the engine's whine rose steadily behind me, then, passing by, it would descend to become a flat hum in the distance ahead like every driver drawing breath and sighing at the completed day's work. In its wake a fold of unmowed grass bent into the vehicle's vacuum and followed away.

Suddenly I found myself becoming caught up in the rush of traffic. It immediately struck me as strange and unsettling, that I on my bicycle in the midst of a self-proclaimed pilgrimage should fall unconsciously into a repetition of this daily sprint. So I stopped pedaling and sat on the roadside to consider. This strange feeling required that I earnestly pause and deliberate why I was where I was, riding my bicycle.

I set to it:

Desire describes the surface, but what is contained within the desire? Somehow through my experiences I've accumulated this longing, but what are its details and contents?

When I'd completed my first journey it resulted in more than what I could have expected. I had conceived it in a naive desire to travel, but when I'd returned, the way in which I viewed everything had changed. I immediately began planning the next trip. Why had I wanted to travel and why now was I urged to continue? I still hadn't understood what was behind my desire, but I had gained an appreciation for the depth of the question. It is simple to give a lot of superficial answers as to why: a desire for simplicity, perhaps, or a need to slow down, to see the world or even just the country. But these barely capture a shade of it. It runs infinitely deeper into my blood and my build.

Travel itself has always come first with intentions following, attributed later as they seem to fit. I know a definitive reason must exist and from what examinations have proceeded I've managed to sufficiently distinguish what I currently see as my main purpose.

These trips are always hatched upon a feeling of dissonance between me and my surroundings. Erupting from stagnation, I'm repelled by the sterile fragility of apartment buildings and the fabric office partitions. There is something that demanded Thoreau to carve a home from the wood and live among it. That same thing endlessly tugged on Tolstoy, begging him to leave both comfort and family and set foot to path for a life of wandering. It is what whispered like an angel's breath in the ear of John Muir from every rustling leaf and crumbling pebble, his pulse quickening at its beckoning. It haunted Kerouac's steps all the years of his life. It is found equally in our blood and those stretches of land where the absolute satisfaction of every sense lies, that satisfaction most deeply engrained in humanity's heritage. It lies in the natural landscape and in the search for community and parity with it. This place was our home at our dawn and will be our bed in the dusk. It is our mother and sister and daughter, father and brother and son. The intimate love of it is fastened to our deepest body, bone and mind. From the foundations of humankind drifts a stream of profound appreciation for its natural ruggedness in which we matured. It has been hindered by modernity's vain distractions and so now I submerge myself wholly to be baptized in its primitive banks and to look out with renewed perspective from beneath its surface.

In the ignition of time came the unfurling of space and life developed and was gifted unto the primordial wild father, Adam. He was born and he learned for a time and then came his cursed fall in the instant when he became aware, realized, and understood and could comprehend himself. Then he commenced his migrations. His consciousness and migratory pattern is my birthright and inheritance, and I've been gifted and cursed by it and refuse to let it waste.

Through flawed eyes I look out on the sanctified landscape and see: the choir of birds who sing praises on high; the trees, austere monks, perpetually meditating on the cyclical wisdom found in days and seasons; and I look up to our priest, the sun, at his pulpit, the sky, his mere presence exposing to me in daily revelation the vision of God!

Travel is my vehicle for this experience. What could be more desirable to the one who seeks awakening into the rudimentary ends of experience? I find it readily along this black line of asphalt crawling beyond vision and conception, piercing and shattering the horizon's edge. It is no means to an end, but an end in itself. This is why I travel.