Halfway

I woke up this morning at an America’s Best Inn (which was…not), walked the dog in a scrubby patch of sewer-drainage field behind the fast food restaurant next door, and then came back inside to do a quick bit of Dance of Shiva. I lay very carefully on the floor in a post-Shiva meditation because I didn’t want any of my appendages to accidentally extend past the yoga mat, possibly causing skin to come into contact with floor. The entire room smelled of air freshener the way a smoker smells too much of mint: you know there’s something to hide.

Just as I started to pack up the car, heavy sheets of rain started falling and I tried comically, unsuccessfully to cover myself with a hotel towel as I ran in and out of the room. My entire back got drenched and as we drove away I blasted the heat on high to stay warm, if not dry. The windshield fogged with humidity.

While our drive yesterday was full of sunny rolling hills in Indiana, today was nothing but grey-white rain in Missouri.

Most of the day I listened to Kitchen Table recordings. The voices of friends with a shared mission kept me company and inspired me as I drove. The dog’s head lay over my shoulder (he’s been banished from the passenger seat after getting tangled in my chargers and wires one too many times).

Havi’s calm presence reminded me yet again how pattern shifting, change, can come slowly. That it need not always be as violent and as dramatic as I make it. I reflected on how many times I have gradually drifted into unconsciousness when I couldn’t face what was going wrong in my life. How even at my most numb, eventually something deep inside of me stirred, woke up and demanded I change everything in an instant.

The only other thing I have felt like listening to today has been the E Street Radio station on satellite radio. The Boss has always been the ultimate road trip soundtrack for me. Not just for the charging rock music, but more importantly for the lyrics. Every song tells a story of loss and redemption, of beauty that can be found in pain. Of transformation.

I decided to stop 10 miles from Kansas. Just short of the Mississippi. Where radio station call letters will start with K instead of W (or at least they would if I weren’t listening on satellite). I’m not sure why. Partly it’s that I don’t know whether to head north now, through Nebraska and Montana, or due West through Colorado and then Utah. But I think it’s more than that. I think I want to make a moment out of crossing over.

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