A trail into the Wilderness

"A final detail: on the morning of my departure, I had seen thirty-eight Blood Moons, an age that carries its own madness and futility. With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected."
-William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways

I was telling my friend Catherine about how I felt things coming together in unexpected ways--ways that are making leaving easier, neater, tidier. Ways that are making Home something that can propel me onward, rather than drag me back. She said it was as though God was sweeping the brush and snow off of the little trail leading into the wilderness. And her description, that vision, has settled in my mind like I plan on settling in my car--with will and supplies enough to last me quite a while.

The thing is, this seemingly average metaphor is actually a really accurate description. I can't see anything ahead of me accept this wilderness. And this patch of cleared trail. And the unbending fact that if I want to move forward, I have to do so without knowing what happens next.

For me, despite what appears to be an adventurous flair, change has always been bad. Not that things haven't ever changed for the good. But, to me, the character of change has always been not just a mischievous one, but a villainous one. Someone that brings death and loss. Someone I'd avoid even if he owed me money. Even if it was a lot of money. I just don't like the guy.

I guess, with this trip, I've had enough change that I realize the need for more. And it may be silly--at least in a past time, I would have argued so--but I really feel like this trip is part of that change, a catalyst, or, to be more metaphorically accurate, a trail, luring and leading me into the unknown.

So, again from Blue Highways, one more quote for the road.

"Maybe the road could provide a therapy through observation of the ordinary and obvious, a means whereby the outer eye opens an inner one. STOP, LOOK, LISTEN, the old railroad crossing signs warned. Whitman calls it 'the profound lesson of reception.'

New ways of seeing can disclose new things: the radio telescope revealed quasars and pulsars, and the scanning electron microscope showed the whiskers of the dust mite. But turn the question around: Do new things make for new ways of seeing?"