29 September 2007 - Pittsboro, NC
Miles from nowhere…
We leave tomorrow. The train is scheduled to stop in Greensboro at 4 AM, and we’re scheduled to be on it. Scheduled…that’s a word that defines the next six weeks. I look forward to it with both anticipation and a deep sense of fatigue. I am weary in my bones. Weary of the news of the world. Weary of the long hours in a chair. Weary of worry. It will feel good, I think, to set out into the world for a time. We will visit some beautiful places, and meet some beautiful people. And we will do our work in the world. Hard to complain about that…
Miles from nowhere. I feel unhomed. I know now that I will be leaving this place. I do not know where I will end up. Peak oil and climate change and the mass extinction have loosened me from any expectations I once held. Changes in my personal life have cut me apart from the knowns that had defined my existence. And twinges of health and body bring me up short, undermining assumptions and blasting through denial like tiny mines embedded in my soul. Setting out into the world, unhomed and unknown, as the world itself unravels around us, is a frightening thing to do.
I want to hunker down. I want to get quiet and close in. I want to become invisible. But right now, I have things I must do, and those things require that I get on a train, my back aching and my heart confused and sad, and walk this path.
Miles from nowhere deep in my bones…and yet venturing out into a multitude of somewheres, perhaps to find, there in circle, the only real place to be these days. The night is not quite so dark, when we sit together in a circle and share the bonfire of our collective lives.
From circle to circle.
Touching the ground.
Here we go…
Tim
Email This Post To A Friend
This entry was posted
on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 10:34 am and is filed under Travel Blog.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 1st, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Tim,
Good luck to you and Sally on your West coast tour.
When you are in San Francisco you might meet up with Dennis Brumm. He has seen part of “What at Way to Go” and I encouraged him to visit the movie site and go to one of the screenings in San Francisco.
Dennis worked on “The Myths of Biofuels” (Sutro Tower Video) which I just acquired on DVD. It features David Fridley from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab who pretty much demolishes any hope that we can run our cars by exhausting the last six inches of Midwestern topsoil growing corn. This fits in nicely with James Howard Kunstler’s point of view regarding what a disaster the automobile has been for the landscape and the environment.
If you have some interest in it you can visit http://www.sfbayoil.org/sfoa/myths and check it out.
BTW, Dennis has also been active in peak oil awareness in the Bay Area. Hope he hooks up with you at one of the screenings.
Here in the Monadnock Region the leaves are beginning their descent to the ground. The evening air is taking on a chill. Porch screens coming off on Columbus Day. It was a good summer.
Tim Wessels