transcendence, today!

Today I was in my car driving and the sunlight came through the window in a thousand scattered flowers but still I was the blossom and unfolded and my freckles darkened and my blue eyes were bluet and I was at risk of crashing my car. Crashing always a risk in ecstasy. The sky was in my favorite form, violent, full fathom five, deep and morose grey blue. Some old song came through the radio ' I'm burnin, I'm burnin for you.... burn out the day, burn out the night...' and there were tossed on the wet face of concrete and pavement, thousands and thousands of dying leaves, just pulled and snapped from the branches of the only home they had ever known, into the fluttering open bodies of thousands of other leaves, to have their orange and red and yellow paints pounded into dirt, street, underneath the tires of my car, tearing down the road with the window rolled down, so that the rain came smacking and leaping and hitting on the right side of my body and face, so that I could remember that I am alive, I am alive. I felt my heart take a deep breath and turn it's tired self over, to face the exhausted and scared side toward dark, and rest, and the blood mouth filled red blossom toward sunlight, toward my eyes, which themselves turned toward the dim light in the sky, hardly to be seen past the rain. The wind was so cold. My skin and my arms and my breath leapt and I was aware that December had come with this great grand storm of pounding rain, rain, rain and wind and cold and leaves and offered me a redemption, and where I had seen only the dark and rolling tires, I could open my arms and eyes and roll clean out to the ends of my stem and see that I had again, just begun. Every time this happens and I realize this is possible, still possible, I have a deeper and more profound gratitude that I still, in the moment, live a life where I am capable of this. I do not take this new breath of life for granted nor do I expect that it will continue to fold and unfold this way, as it has for the length of my life so far. Yet I hope fervently that it does. If there comes a day when my mind , spirit or body is

' so beaten and so battered... ' not capable of responding to the world around me this way, I will be either a new person I am not capable of seeing or understanding now, or I will be gone.

Isn't it the strangest thought of all, to imagine tires rolling down a wet road, leaves sticking to the black rubber, making that delicious scrunch-crunch noise on the tar...without your life on this planet to see them feel them or hear them again? They are there. You are not. Beyond my understanding. It leaves the echo of that noise in my head, as if death, instead of being a great void, is a great void between. Not nothingness, but the sound and crunch and move of those tires down the road, far away, where you can hear them and remember them, but never find them again. You either stay looking forever for those wet December roads, or you move forward to something completely new. I admit, I think I would stay a long time- I love moving cars on rain soaked, tree lined streets.

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image, nikki jane