And Breath Will Be Rain

Day 43, Rockhound State Park, New Mexico. Heading into the southernmost part of New Mexico, I had been told I was wandering beyond the edge of nowhere. I cannot say this is so.

The past days, suffused with stardust and shared humanity, have been journeys into the unexpected unfamiliar, true. But they have not taken me to nowhere. I wandered into the sublime – bumbling into strangeness in what could otherwise be taken as ordinary: seeing stars, being kissed by kindness in confusion and fear.

What strikes me as strange here as I read my own words is that we could see anything as ordinary.

Those encounters are still shaking loose an unceasing pull in me. It is a pull I believe to be common to all of us. A lean toward comfort, toward looking away from something too stupendous to behold or too disquieting to the heart to fathom.

Even as this is so, I sensed it was time to move on, perhaps as much so that my soul can make of me more human.