Writing to Connect: Presence

It’s early December, the holiday season is in full swing, I’ve driven my car over three thousand miles in the last five weeks, Barack Obama has just been elected as America’s 44th President, and I’m at a Travelodge in Grant’s Pass, Oregon, with a guy sawing away in his sleep in the room next door.

The trip has been such a whirl of cities and suburbs, time changes and time on the road -- it has brought me closer to my extended family than I had imagined it would or could at the outset, allowing me enough time to immerse myself in the lives of my aunts, uncles and cousins in a way that I am relishing.

Tomorrow morning I’m planning to get up and out early, pointed south toward one of California’s Redwood state parks. The thought of seeing those giant trees is touching a childish part of me, an awe I can remember feeling while looking at pictures of Redwoods in books when I was very young. And that’s fun, really … I guess that’s all I’m trying to say. To reconnect with that innocence, to feel it bubbling up gradually over the past several days amidst the rush of all the other positive emotions and thoughts I’ve been having, has been a blessing.

So much of what I have been seeing is entirely new and fresh to my 25-year-old eyes. Driving through each vista, my senses seem to bound and leap to keep up with it all … I catch myself chuckling at my mind’s inability to process it all at once. I lie in bed and try to recall the images to the surface, willing myself to catalogue all the beauty. I realize on an intuitive level that the riches I’m getting aren’t those that can be filed away and saved … they’re of a different sort entirely. This sort of riches leave their mark on the subconscious, maybe, or on the chemical makeup of the brain. The eyes take them in and the mind goes “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” … and the high you get is your reward for slowing down enough to really SEE them.

I just finished reading Anne Lammott’s wonderful book on faith, Traveling Mercies. In her teasingly sardonic, clear way, she repeatedly tells of days in her life where she felt as though God has simply been showing off – making the luster of things jump more than usual, or sparkle that much more brightly. Today, leaving Portland, I had this ill-defined, sleepy, dragging mood hanging around the edges of my head. I knew the trip I was taking was fresh. I knew a part of me was happy to be back on the road … but there was another part of me that was sad to be leaving my aunt Anna Lisa after a trip where I think we both felt a real bond. The mood lasted for hours, and I was actually getting pretty frustrated. Here I was driving through fields that were, quite literally, emerald green and dotted with herds of tan sheep contrasted against the low dark mountains in the distance, and all I could think about was how much I was wishing I could relive the last month again. I have never had a month that has been more varied or stimulating, and a part of me was – and is – sad that it’s over. I was also missing my friends back home, my brother and sister, my parents. My brain was looking backwards … it was projecting forwards … it was doing everything but drinking in the emerald around me.

And then the sun began to set. Shadows started getting long. From time to time I’d see the shadow of my little car speeding to the left of me, twice as large, on the bank of a hillside. I climbed a little in elevation, passed through some low-hanging fog in the hills, and came around the bend with a beam of sunshine square in my face. The remnants of passing storm clouds hung below a dense blanket of higher grey cover. Backlit by the brilliant rays, the wispy lower clouds shone with a white intensity around their edges, giving me this whole expanse of gleaming, multi-tiered blazing beauty. God was, as Anne would say, really hamming it up ... putting on a show for the finale of the day. And like that, I was there. I was in.

And now I’m back here … back in this Travelodge. I’m thinking of the beauty of what I might see tomorrow, the guy (or gal) next door is still snoring away, and I’m trying to push back the nagging questions I have about what I’m going to do with myself once my money runs out and this wonderful trip comes to a conclusion. When I was little – and a lot of the time now, still – I’d be engrossed in the adventure and grandeur of a movie, getting whisked along in some other, fantastic world, and then suddenly I’d find myself stepping out of the plot long enough, there in the darkness in my seat, to worry about the fact that eventually the whole mystery would end, the lights would come on … and I’d have to get up and go back to my world … to a place not quite as fantastic, to people that were a little less dramatic and engaging in circumstances that seemed, at times, painfully ordinary. And in removing myself from the movie in that way, I’d killed the magic of that piece of the film … I’d taken something from the enjoyment I might otherwise have had.

My sole desire, really, for the remainder of this trip is that I can hold the ghosts of that dread at bay -- or, better yet, obliterate it entirely. I pray that I can slow down enough, open my eyes wide enough, open my arms far enough to be able to embrace those Redwoods tomorrow – but also to love the comfort of a cheap hotel room today … to love the music I’ve put on, to love the movie I just let myself get carried into, to love reconnecting with the words of Joseph Campbell on the pages of a book I bought in Portland. I am moving toward that mindfulness, gradually: that much I know. I'm learn to love the time I am in, simply because it allows me to look deeper within myself, free from the distractions that typically inundate my brain.