Taking Off...

Sometimes you wake up and you know nothing other than you need to go...

Yesterday was one of those days.  Life has been wonderful in some areas lately and incredibly hard in others.  So when I awoke yesterday, I knew it was a road trip day.  I just needed to get out and away.  Windshield time.  Hair blowing in the wind time.  Travel to destinations unknown time.

So I suggested it to my daughter and she agreed.  So off we went...

Montaña de Oro was the destination.  With a short stop in Los Alamos for bread.  It was a lovely day, with lots of sunshine, the rocky shoreline a pleasant change from the tar stricken beach we usually tread.

We listened to music. We talked.  We laughed.  We drank Red Bull and ate chips and candy.  It was a lovely day.  Perfect weather.  We even found a few moonstones on the beach, which delights me in a way I cannot completely understand.  There is something about found treasure...something of value just waiting for discovery.

We needed this time.  To just be.  Nothing to do and nothing to discuss.  Just time well spent in nature.

Road trips make me happy.  They make me feel alive and free.  I love the open road, with no real destination in mind.  My only task to notice, to see, to feel, to breathe.

I mean, that is also my task every day of my life.  But noticing, seeing, feeling and breathing tends to get subsumed by the shuffle of daily living.  I do all those things all day long, every day.  But I fail to notice them for the significance they play in my life until I am on the road and untethered from my home, routines and responsibilities. 

Taking off for a daytime adventure grants passage to me to places within me that I don’t have access to while living the mundane life at home.  I know I have said this before...but I guess I keep writing about it because it always stuns me a little. Like how can I be this person, this whole person, and not have completely access to myself all the time?  How is that possible?

I continue to be flummoxed.  So I guess I will continue to write about it...it is the only way I know to sort it all out.  Writing for me is transformative, it is the way I move from one iteration of me to another.  I think many people do that without all the wordiness but that is not for me.  I need to write it down to process it all.  Like the writing slows my mind to a place where I can sink more deeply into myself, like the words are tiny shovels that unearth previous unknown places within my soul.

Sometimes I write a sentence and when I review it, I wonder, “who wrote that?”  I mean I know it was me, but it is so honest, so fucking true, that it feels written by someone else.

I wrote something awhile ago and apparently I did it on the fly, and just shoved the paragraph into a journal entry on my computer.  When I was beseeching the universe for a morning topic, I found it there and I was amazed.  It was so good!  So, of course, I thought it was written by someone else.  So much so that I put it into ChatGPT to see who the author was.  I mean, I do not ever want to take someone else’s words as my own.  I can think of no greater slight that to misattribute someone’s writing to another.  The ire it would cause within is ferocious.  

Chat came back with, “Um, you wrote that...” Which I found hilarious.  AI knew I wrote it but I didn’t.  And that is how much what I think and write comes from this other place for me a great deal of the time.  It is almost like I need to mix it up, be jarred into a new thought process by the great wide expanse of places that are new and burgeoning.

Yesterday we took off but I also took in.

And that is something I need almost as much.  A willingness to continuously go within and apparently in order to do that I have to move myself outward into the world...

Again, still...