Remembrances of a Road Trip

I’ve been feeling, lately, as though way too much time has gone by since my last blog post. It’s not that I haven’t been writing – I have – it’s just that sometimes I have trouble figuring out what’s a ‘blog post’ and what’s just an internal, personal ramble.

However, I just pulled up some short little things I’ve written over the past few months, and I felt like a few of them might be good things to share with people. I’ve been wondering, lately, how best to share some of the experiences I had on my trip. I've driven over 11,000 miles in the past five months, from Pennsylvania out to California and back ... and it's been the most densely inspiring period of time I've had in my life to date.

The trip changed me in ways, both profound and subtle, that I’m still sifting through.

I have so many photos, so many journal entries … and I think that sharing some of it is a way for me to keep the experiences alive and fresh in my psyche. So here are a few little ‘ramblings’ …

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Early April:

Perhaps learning to love, exuberantly, is the central piece of self discovery, of self fulfillment. Maybe we really only find ourselves by gulping in the brilliance of those around us.

Spending days like today and last night, deep in conversation with friends like Erin, learning new music from – and talking about life with -- friends like Freddie, giving big old bear hugs to old friends I haven’t seen for months … it all makes me so deeply happy to be alive and exploring, breathing and smiling. Add to that a collection of sights and sounds from across the country and I’ve suddenly found it utterly impossible not to see the grandeur of what we’re in the midst of.

It’s been a long while since I’ve practiced any sort of dogmatic, orderly type of religion … a long while since I’ve gone to church … a long while since I’ve prayed with any frequency. Yet I feel there’s a deeply loving God, made manifest in the mountains, sparkling down from the night sky (as Donald Miller rightly says …), wishing fervently that we’d all just sit back and breathe. That we’d all stop to take stock of how much we have around us to be thankful for.

I laid in the grass on a hillside overlooking a meadow, way, way, way up in the mountains of Northern California and I stared at the blue sky for longer than I’ve stared at anything for quite some time. I felt the breeze hitting my skin, watched vultures circle down in the valley, took a brief nap on the firm ground. I thought about the things I’ve been through in the past few years, the people I know and love, the people that love me. I thought about how we’re all on our own separate paths towards our own separate visions of goodness, of worthwhile work, of family and community. I thought about what it was like when I was a kid … about how I used to sit or lie outside like that FAR more frequently, thinking thoughts that I’ve long since forgotten, but which, at the time, drifted into my psyche with a simplicity and unexamined ease that a body never quite regains when the duties and responsibilities start piling up. Yet there I was, letting them drift again, astounded by how similar it felt to those long-forgotten lazy childhood days in the sun.

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Mid-March:

Drove down Highway 101 today, all along the coast of Oregon, stopping off here and there at beaches and historic lighthouses along the way. I bought a sub and a coke and sat at a picnic table watching the sunset in a state park … and kept having this thought that maybe there was a ‘better’ vantage point. How silly is that? The simple fact of the gorgeous sun setting, anywhere, is enough of a holy bit of wonder for me.

Drinking from a bottle of wine right now in a yurt in the woods in Umpqua State Park in southern Oregon – the yurt being much more posh than I would have imagined. Little wooden laminate table, four chairs, nice lamp, forest green curtains and curved lattice-work walls … bunk beds, with a bigger, almost double-sized bed on the bottom. Also a couch, an electric heater … a front porch with a light!

I’m entertaining the idea of staying at this park for one more night, maybe getting a cheaper tent site tomorrow. That way I could drive back up to the lighthouse to watch the sunset, and then drive back on down here with supplies and wood for a fire, dinner, and a proper camping experience. Then again, I may just keep heading south. The cabin calls my name. There’s wood to chop.

I’m feeling the arc of this trip pretty fully these days. When I began, I had no idea how I’d respond to the movement and change, and now I’ve been the entire way across the country and explored a little taste of California and Oregon. This country is incredible … I hope that I’m able to come back here again and do this sort of roaming.

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Mid-December:

I believe that the single biggest concept that I’ve grasped as a result of this trip is the notion that life is too beautiful—and the people in it too precious—to harbor doubts and regrets about the life I am living.

I just sat down and looked through most of the photos I’ve taken in the past two months, starting with the ones I took of my cat, Toby, at my parents’ house in Lititz the night I left for Chicago. There are shots of me with my aunts and uncles in cities and towns all across the US … and many of those places were firsts for me. First glimpses. First real tangible ideas about what life looks like here, what it looks like there, how they talk somewhere else or what types of music and culture go on in new places that used to be outside of my experience.

And now they are all inside. And that opening, as it were, has allowed me to feel a certain come-uppance in the world. I feel as though there’s so much more to explore—but that I have made an earnest start.

Now, contemplating my return to Lititz and my family and all of the visits with friends that I will likely engineer, I can’t help but feel that my interactions with them all will be a bit more poignant, simply because something about all this travel and distance has made me appreciate the particulars and the people of my life so much more than I was ever able to before.

For a while there I felt as though I was living the earliest parts of adulthood in this completely baffled state. My choices felt rushed, my thoughts muddy … it was uncomfortable, at best, but mainly just frightening.

Yet now I feel changed somehow. I feel a profound exuberance to be alive and surrounded by such a loving mix of people. I feel deliriously excited to have the freedom to choose the rest of my path forward in life. Joseph Campbell says that “awe moves us forward.” My friend Claire, in a birthday card to me, wrote about the “awe-inspiring uncertainty” of this time of life. What a perfect way of saying it.

So if you combine those two ideas … the very fact that all of this uncertainty inspires awe is the thing that moves us forward. I am certainly uncertain right now about what path or paths to take in the coming months and years. Yet I have spent the past two months in awe … and I can already feel my spirit’s forward progress.

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ps -- I've been using Facebook as a way to share all of my photos from the trip with family and friends. However, I thought it might be cool to have all of the links culled together 'here' for other people who might not be on 'there' ... or who might just want to scan through them in a more sequential context:

Road Tripping Part 1: Chicago
Road Tripping Part 2: Madison, Wisconsin

Road Tripping Part 3: Snowy South Dakota
Road Tripping Part 4: Bend and Missoula

Road Tripping Part 5: Seattle
Road Tripping Part 6: Portland

Road Tripping Part 7: California
Road Tripping Part 8: California, Act II

Road Tripping Part 9: The Oregon Coast
Road Tripping Part 10: Arizona and New Mexico