“Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.”

                -Bertrand Russell

I’ve been a pitiful human being lately.  I can’t seem to finish a book, I haven’t been able to string together more than a few sentences, and I haven’t picked up my guitar in three months.  The little things around me which are normally colorful and steeped in magic have turned grey for the most part.  Needless to say I’ve been busy, anxiety ridden and nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof. 

Last Saturday I found myself on hands and knees picking through the dusty bottom-shelf books in a used bookstore in Van Buren, Arkansas (my old family home place, going back 185 years).  It is there I saw it . . . a book of French poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, one of my literary heroes.  I will admit I was stunned, to find such a book in that musty bookstore which otherwise specialized in Harlequins and Oprah’s book-o-the-month Club.  In my general disinterest, I thumbed through it and then placed it back on the shelf.  I will sadly say that I also passed on a wonderful book of 19th Century sketches by Frederick Remington, ranging in scenes from the Plains Indian Wars to slave auctions in Africa.

I was thinking about this as I was headed back home; how I would love to have bought that book of poetry by Rilke; but I was a hundred miles too far to turn around.  And then it hit me . . .  my improbable Rilke discovery was a small sign from the Universe (I do believe in cosmic influences).  If it were anyone other than Rilke, I would be skeptical.  But to me his words convey a fundamental wisdom about the cosmos and of life and of art and of the spirit.  And lately I’ve been suffering from a virus of the spirit.  So last night, I did the only thing I could think to do . . . I re-read my book of letters by Rilke.  

“[If solitude escapes you, if you are struggling with your soulless, petrified profession] . . . full of demands, full of enmity against the individual . . . try being close to things, they will not desert you; there are the nights still and the winds that go through the trees and across many lands; among things and with the animals everything is still full of happening, in which you may participate; and children are still the way you were as a child, sad like that an happy, and if you think of your childhood you live among them again, among the solitary children, and the grown-ups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.”

                - Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

So I’m being reinvigorated by this, with all his wisdom swimming around inside me, so much so that I want to scream in ecstasy, to rejoin the living.       

Right now I’m daydreaming of another trip on the highway of my life . . . out to the western prairie, perhaps the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandle; a place where maps are unnecessary if you have an inherent sense of the four cardinal directions; the place from which all those beautiful yet horrific migrant pictures were taken and those of the dust bowl farmers, as they waded through sandy drifts, leaning mightily into the dusty winds. 

Woody Guthrie - Dust Pneumonia Blues:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_6GhaA0AXg

 

It is not like that now of course.  Just gently rolling straight-shot country highways, vast stretches of prairie, threadbare juniper thickets on the north facing bluffs, and mile upon mile of fencerows and high wires, providing a perch for the various birds, especially the acrobatic scissor tail fly catcher and the oriole, my favorite birds. 

“A couple of Easterners rebuilt the burned state capital in Austin in exchange for over a million acres near Dalhart [in the Texas panhandle].  The Easterners went broke trying to fence all that land.  There is a metaphor of something grand here.”

                -Jim Harrison, from Off to the Side

Just my motorcycle, a bedroll and the occasional “nostalgic pleasure” of a 50s era road (“roach”) motel.  There is the thought that when you ride a motorcycle all day long, in the wind, sun and rain, sleep comes easily, regardless of circumstances. 

Perhaps I will take the opportunity to think long and hard about the questions that have been swirling around in my mind for some time.  Will I, as someone who experiences the world so deeply, ever be safe with someone for the rest of my life, sharing a beautiful adventure?   Or is restlessness my fate?  I can only hope that the answer to the latter is no, because I am tired of searching, of being restless.  But this restlessness, paying such attention to life, feeling others, feeling life so deeply, seems to grow stronger with the passing of each day. 

I’m being attacked by hungry mosquitos on my front porch sanctuary, so it is time to go.  To surrender to a few pesky mosquitos would otherwise be ridiculous if it weren’t for the fact that west Nile virus was present in 100 of 100 mosquitos sampled by the Tulsa Health Department.    

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