‘My Oldest And Dearest Friend’
It’s hard to explain the organic quality of a road unless you’ve been down it. Perhaps on a Motorcycle, in the dark and the rain, sometimes afraid, but always with your senses more alive than at any other time.
More feeling The Road than seeing it, and more wishing for the outcome than its certainty, The Road you choose is one that you must travel alone.
The Road knows that I am faithful and no longer in search of another mistress. I ride in awe of her beauty as she brings out the very best in me. Wanting her all to myself, she laughs at my folly, telling me that: “Of course, she belongs to me and to me alone,” as she watches me leave. The breath inside of me exhales, but the memory of what’s not forgotten lingers, and I go to bed each night in a cheap motel feeling her turning inside me once more.
Alone on her twists and turns, my thoughts become guided taking me to places in her grandeur that I would never have gone before. Never promising destination, only duty bound, allowing me to find myself within every drop and elevation that her direction leads.
The Road Only Travels One Way … The Way I Need To Go
I am with her during times of her sickness too. Sitting in the waiting room of her road construction, I watch the large machines rip open her back, replacing what’s vital within her and allowing her to take me to places I have never seen.
The mountains and canyons stand in awe of The Road realizing they only sit in reference to what The Road already knows. Without The Road, their splendor would only be a bleak reminder of potential greatness within themselves. Without The Road to tell the story, their narrative becomes self-serving and unwashed and then unknown — not even forgotten. It is only The Road and its traveler that carries their message for today and a thousand more as it has always been. Footpath or gravel, asphalt or concrete, the surface is only that. It stands as an invitation to the traveler who is quickly absorbed in the motion it instills.
The Road can never offer you safety — protection being the veil that keeps enlightenment out. The Road offers much more. In its total exposure, it removes all invisibility exposing you for what you are today while presenting again what its next turn may bring. The Road places all things in motion, carrying your message inside its spirit while delivering you to a place of immediacy where you arrive alone.
The Road begins where excuses end, leaving weakness along its apron, allowing only true meaning to pass through and by. The Road has no toll beyond the one you set for yourself and has no permanent ending. Endings are something that have already been discarded and left behind.
Do you wish to be great or just to live among greatness? The Road never makes you choose. The Road needs to be ridden like oceans need to be crossed — all meaning pent up in the traverse of its direction. Understanding is just a myth here. True knowledge waits in the deliverance of how you feel once the travel is done.
There is no deal making to be done with The Road, that is for the hitchhiker and those from a lesser time.
If The Road ever were to end, it would end in the transcendence of your spirit — the place where lovers go to die and children of a greater God are born again. The Road gives you this without your asking, and without praise or blame you are accepted for who you have now and forever become.
(The West: August, 2011)