Yesterday I told Kathy that I missed the mountains. That was after hitting western Nebraska. Today we arrived in Dubuque. If anyone had asked me, I’d say I missed the freedom.
Hardly anyone outside el Norte would understand this, and God knows I mean no disrespect to any friends or relations, but it’s true. If you live inside the prison long enough, you don’t notice the bars on the windows. Leaving New Mexico, I could feel the rigidity setting in, and by midday today it was locked in place. All very nice, you understand … clean streets and houses, wonderful people, and rather than outright suppression of dissent, an apparently unshakeable conviction in the rightness and realness of it all.
I don’t have to travel outside of my home to feel the pressure. It can happen with certain well-meaning people who just won’t “got there.” But for some reason Taos seems to attract a lot of folks who make casual observations of the sort that would kill dinner table conversation in places like Nebraska. In Taos I feel like anything is possible. In other places, I get the feeling — just a feeling, mind you, but it registers — that coloring outside the lines is grounds for physical punishment, maybe because it scares people.
The problem (?) for me is, once you leave the station, there’s no going back, and it can get a little lonely. In the last few years, for example, it’s gotten to the point that I can hardly stand cities. Driving through Omaha today, I was struck by how little there remained of natural landmarks. How could this be? It’s as if unless we dig and pour and build something that reflects us, we simply don’t exist. There’s no relationship to the surroundings. We’re divorced from the spirit of the land. Now how am I supposed to be a good American, support free enterprise, and praise the glorious achievements of Western civilization if everything we have is a symbol of dysfunction?
This makes me the crazy one, and that’s what takes a heavy dose of semi-enlightenment to handle (not that I have this). Like when I hear people talking about retirement. What’s that? To me it just means that they’re not doing what they love. If they were, why would they ever stop? If retirement is when you get to do what you want, what was the point of the preceding 40 years?? And how can you suddenly be good at something you’ve never tried???
Forgive the rambling, but there are more layers to this than I have time to examine now. Later perhaps, or never. There’s too much thinking going on as it is.
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Ouch!
Reading this, sipping my green tea at 05:30, as I prepare for another day of job-hunting while at work (my funding stops at the end of May), I can’t help but take the words to heart.
I am no one to take advice from (hoo boy), but I know I have to do what I love. Otherwise there’s no reason for living.