Highway Feels

Sunday night I drove back from the lake with my window down. I don’t often do this. It’s noisy. I can’t hear the radio. My hair blows around. It’s annoying. But, for whatever reason, as I drove through the quiet village streets of the lake towards the highway I didn’t roll up my window—and I liked it.

An opportunity to remember

I hit the highway and set the cruise. The sun was setting and he didn’t disappoint. The light was golden and across the horizon, the sky ramped from pastel pink to fuchsia. I turned the radio off (not that I could hear it anyhow) to listen to the wind instead. The air felt good on my face. My hair was pulled tight. I was as far from annoyed as I could get. I was pleased. Calm.

Roadside suppers

With no radio, my thoughts wandered. I recalled a time about a decade ago when I was traveling on the highway on my way home from somewhere—my recollection and my guess is that I may have been coming home from Waskesui. Maybe. But I know for sure I was heading home and the journey was relatively long. At some point on that journey, it was time to eat and home was still a way to go. I pulled onto an approach used by farmers and rolled in between the fields.

The highway was quiet. It was early evening and the sun was not yet setting. The fields were rolling like waves. I remember a few birds flying and landing on trees that edged the grain fields. I opened the back door of my car, which opened like a door, and took out a container of food from my cooler. A perfect place to tailgate.

I ate and drank whatever bits were left over in my cooler. I sat cross-legged watching the world, observing everything around me while I ate slowly and thoughtfully. At the time I didn’t consciously think about ‘locking in‘ my experience. I was just having a meal at the side of the road. I was not only devouring my meal but also the practice of being alone. It was a time of stretching the lonely muscle—of being with myself and trying not to feel alone—or sad about it. It was a challenging time. But I accepted that moment and found the joy in it.

I suppose that’s how I stretched the metaphorical muscle.

The gift

That moment, at the time, was weighted with loneliness and sadness. It wasn’t heavy. It was just my underlying state of being. I quietly ate, looking around with the company of the fields, the critters, and the birds. The gift is that over a decade later I recall that side highway supper as a gift, a really pretty memory. I do not recall it as a lonely time.

Now I am grateful for something that back then I wanted to look different than it did.

Ten years later I seek out periods of solitude—not because I don’t love my people—but because I need those moments by myself to exist without any external influences. And who knows when another memory will pop up in my brain, reminding me how far I’ve come, how much I’ve grown, and how pretty my life was and is. It has been an evolution. The Course in Miracles says that miracles are a shift in perception. Indeed they are.

As always, thank you for reading Lovelies.