I wrote the following short essay while riding shotgun on the first leg of a month-long family trip. Somewhere in the middle of Kansas.
Traveling
I don’t know why it’s making me so emotional this time. I have traveled so many roads and driven thousands of miles. I am reading poems out loud to Matt while we drive I-70 west through the endless fields and spaces of Kansas. I can’t stop tearing up. Every line about longing, every phrase about love, every lament about the state of the world is making my heart overflow with emotion. It’s like every single thing that a human can possibly feel has been swishing around in a cauldron inside my chest and saying the words to a poem out loud adds enough potion to make it all seep up over the edges. Traveling is a privilege, this I know. But for some reason I am feeling it so much more and the gratitude for this beautiful world and life is making my achy heart slide open at every slight turn. Although there aren’t very many turns in Kansas.
While the world feels like the changes are coming so fast, it’s like a meteor shower of rights being stripped away by the highest courts in the land of the “free,” the roads in Kansas are sturdy. Steady and straight. You can see the sparse trees along the highway bent at a permanent angle from the relentless wind and yet, there they are. Changed by the world around them but standing. Sturdy even as they bend. A product of their environments and, also, making the most of the harsh world they find themselves in.
I want to be like these trees. Bending with the surges of wind and rain and the storms but rooted to myself and my pursuit of radical love.
Morning in Kansas.
May we all be in pursuit of radical love as citizens of humanity.
Sending love to you out there in the ether.
Stef
A Favorite song about being a traveler in this life.