I really don't know where I was when I took this picture. I have to guess that it had to have been somewhere in Alabama. The second day of my trip down south, which was a Sunday and Sunday is now my day of great spiritual banking. Find empty places and drinking in spiritual food there... I love the spiritual light of this picture, because it's the refracting of the sunlight through the marks on the windshield, but I was moved by the wide expanse of sky and road. You see the broad sweep of this stretch of highway and those spirits seeming to rise up from the erth, good, clean happy spirits.

There was an old photograph our family had of when this priest and nun from the parish we belonged to came to our house and ate Sunday dinner with us. There was an inexplicable mark that appeared on that picture. It vaguely resembled a dove-shape and my point in bringing up this is there is the proposition that the Spirit of the Universe is either everything or else it is nothing. Either the photograph captures the rapture and deep well-being I was feeling at the moment or it is a picture took from the road where the dirt and grime of the windshield has gathered. Either it IS a figment of the imagination, one that is fired, or else it is the cold soul of a being grounded in the mathematics of reality. Either you can calculate what is happening in the present moment and explain away all the magic of it, or you can let thoughts run wild in amazement of what is happening and what kinds of things it may be promising for the future.


This is some place between Memphis Tennessee and Oxford, Mississippi... I'm listening to blues music at this point, Muddy Waters, Bobby Bland, Howlin Wolf. Elmore James. And Muddy is really the only one from Mississppi but I'm feeling that deep mysticism that comes from being in that place. I think of Twain's Jim running for his life, trying to find his way up to free territory for black slaves, and that song "Hellhound on My Trail" by Robert Johnson running through my mind, that haunting line about "blues falling down like hail" and I see the sunrise, likely when most of the slaves along the railroad had to find a place to hide, deep with the evergreens so noone could find them... There was a hellhound on my trail and it was the fear I had of my self.... the fear that maybe I was running from my self again, that I was going farther and farther away from myself. Etheridge Knight had that line about how he almost kicked it with kinfolk, how he'd almost caught up with himself... I'll never know why the darkest of notions hit me the same way, they puzzle me the deepest. But this is a beautiful portrait of how God wakes up the world. Within a half-hour, I was overwhelmed by the light of day and I would hit pockets of road where I could almost not see anything at all, the rays of sunlight were so bright and penetrating.

I heard the bit on Bob Dylan again today and John Hiatt talked about "All Along the Watchtower" being a reflection of Dylan on the Book Of Isaiah. Now I have to go back and read the Book of Isaiah, because while they played that song, with some kind of spiritual overlay, suddenly that song takes on a whole new meaning for me. Then I see it as an attempt for a deeply troubled but determined man (Dylan) trying to grapple with the message of the divine.
And this guy trying to remain ever introspective on the meanings of texts written down for the purpose of mankind, and what these stories can ultimately teach us about ourselves, about our connection with this whole other dimension of reality, the dimension we sense strongly is there, but have little scientific proof of actually encountering.