Something Iconic

an earlier road journal

I didn't have much chance to write or post much when on the road. I rarely do, when on a road trip. Frankly, this time out it was rough going at times. Lots of incredibly tough things happened, that really threw me for a loop; and then there were moments so glorious and fulfilling they can barely fit into words. Luminosity is a word that can barely contain what it felt like at times: to be filled with light.

So I'll be doing what I usually do after a road trip, which is going through my journal entries and photos from the trip, sorting through to find what good things, and post them over the next week or three. That's the way it works, usually. It's a process of artistic, spiritual, and personal integration.

There were a few events that leave me feeling completely changed, and challenged to continue to work to become a better human being. Art is my way. It is not casual, nor is it a hobby. It is profoundly, deeply, powerfully life-changing, for me. I will pursue this to the end. I don't expect to ever give it up, but rather to be making some kind of art the moment I die. It is not a hobby, it is not casual: it is the very stuff of life, of existence.



So here I am, making an icon: an image of a previous journal, a road journal if life is the road, which it is. Interpreted for myself as an icon of travel writing, or writing about life, containing poetry, thought, drawings, and even a few pressed leaves from time to time. Lots of clutter in the journals. Sorting through the clutter is the process of refinement and reintegration. It doesn't matter what you discover, what matters is that you do seek to discover: that you set out to discover. What I write has often been nothing more than the reports of what I've experienced. if the writing is uniquely my own, which it might someday become, it's because what I've experienced has been filtered through my personal way of speaking, of putting language together, of throwing paint at the wall. Idiosyncratic, iconic, inexpressible at times; a fingerprint unique, even as everyone has the same kind of fingerprints and fingers. What we have in common, what links us all into one, that is the Essentially Human, which I am thinking about today, the morning after my return, as I do my chores of return, the unpacking, touring the gardens left neglected by the traveler, the rest, the time spent in silence, in memory, in watching the light change, sometimes wishing one was still in motion, still traveling, even now at rest, still moving, while the daystar spins over to dusk and the evening deepens, darkening the colors of the flowers I left behind and am now becoming reacquainted with.