Serenity Rises

A blue blacktop of never-ending daylight screams across the horizon line as the machine’s pulse rises and falls in an endless cycle of movement.

Rubber rips. Throttle cables advance. Gears roll on. The engine rumbles.

Planted, the machine echos through out the valley floor. I feel it ache. I hold its hand and it revolves around my sense of the moment.

There are days and there are issues but right now, the landscape never felt grander. It never seemed more alive or more viscous in certainty.

I spy vineyards and cow fields, in equal proportions, as the machine flies down the pike.

Across the fields and through the mindset of the daily grind. So much is fading away. So many thoughts are evaporating. So many stresses letting go…

Why I have not done this more?

Why have I held back?

What was I thinking?

It’s a constant refrain. A constant fear. A sizable and rather matter of fact issue at hand.

Because days like this hold all the grandeur of the universe in their finger tips and I so easily forget it.

Then the road squeezes down. The path becomes constricted. The shadows of the tall oaks spread themselves across the roadway. And in their coverage I’m reminded of the darkness that lurks. The things in life you never quite can put away for good. The faces and feelings that haunt your subconscious.

Yet as the machine rockets though, there’s a kind of spiritual and totally mechanical movement that puts wonders about the next thing, about the after-life, about life in general, on hold.

Fleeting really. Flashes of forward frames dancing off in the distance. With those big conceptual ideas that make you grasp at straws to explain….

Someone crested this hill many, many moons ago – I wonder who he or she was? I wonder what they thought? I wonder how the landscape has changed. Who said this region could grow grapes well? What part of the path they chose was predestined? What part was created? Who manufactured the momentum? Did they realize what they might be starting?

Surely it was not from the seat of an Italian L-Twin… It couldn’t be… Because then there’d be no farms or vineyards or homesteads… Just thousands of divergent asphalt paths shooting off in every mindless direction…