― Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Change used to come to me in small droplets. Fragile and long-awaited, like rain. I’ve been in sun showers and rain storms and felt them soaking in one by one. But this change is different. I am engulfed, submerged in change’s world when before change ventured into mine. I cannot reach my hand out and receive the change I want. I reach out and see that I am pulled by the current that’s been waiting to take hold.
My summer was swift and beautiful and bold. The first swipe on my new canvas. I think of it and yearn for that simplicity that seems so complicated, so unattainable now. But it was so perfect because its end was always destined to be this—the receding of my friends, my family, my city and my mountains. A heightened sense of droplets rumbling at my feet. A notion that my life is no longer still-standing water, but a roar of waves.
My family all piled in a car to drive me to my university. It was like a death processional and victory tour all at once. The road was what it always has been--relentless, graceful, Lion King and Sound of Music magnificent. Mountains and other sights to behold, unfolded before me like pages of a pop up book.
The best, perhaps, was the existential expanse of the great Salt Lake. In places it was strewn with trash, in others devoid even of footprints. Occasionally carefully placed stones created messages in the hardened sand. We stopped where the salt was frozen, arching upwards in small ripples. My brother and I raced across the surface of the abandoned paradise, two specks moving closer and closer to the mountains ghostly in the distance. Rain water trickled across the surface, over our scratched feet.
Even when stopped at the side of the road, nature in soft acts of motion pushed me on.
"It was like a death processional and victory tour all at once." Love this, you awesome you. What a treat, these readings. You amaze me the way your words come to life. To life!
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