What's in a drive?

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We're up and on the road north, over the piedmont. Some of the oak trees are holding onto leaves, deep red and crinkly brown. I remember the fire that burned this fall from sumac to creeper. It climbed up the hickory and set it to orange flames!

Now I'm staring down a wall of mountain. It reminds me of a silky grey ribbon blowing in a breath of wind and slowed down so that i can follow each ripple. The ripples look frozen, solid, unmoving and unchangeable. After a moment of reflection, though, I realize that the mountains are moving. As I draw nearer, time begins to slow for me. Cars passing me become streaks of color and then disappear entirely. The sky is a pulsing strobe of night and day. Then, the mountain's face slowly comes alive. Gashes open in the rock, grow, and race along the mountain chain. Arms are thrust out and recoiled. Dirty flesh is shorn away showing grey bone. It dissolves itself into soil and is thrown away. The earth under my seat becomes like water and I sink into darkness.

All the while time speeds up so that I begin to hear or feel a low and cyclical hum. It's not coming from one place, but all places. From the very small, a fast trill, from the very large, a deep ostinato. It's the sound of stars crashing and pulling apart, and the sound of electrons whirring around protons. I am beginning to understand the great ebbs and flows that are in All.

You may think that my day dream ended there, and I continued onto my home. In fact, I am still back there caught in a quanta of time, stuck in one instance with Susan beside me. We are not moving. We have no past and no future, no momentum, no direction. Yet, somehow two timelines come spiraling through the quanta, dip into that instance, make real the moment, then spiral away through the countless other snippets of time, so that Susan and I think we are driving the car up a mountain, when it is only our consciousnesses passing through snapshots, pictures of time.

Our lives are reels of movie frames, like discrete snapshots of time. Our minds are the projectors. But all we can focus on is the motion picture it creates.

I for one take comfort from the idea that I am forever back there climbing that mountain, feeling excited for the future and pleased with my company.

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