Spirit Road

Whenever I am in an unpleasant situation or stressed out or having a surgery or getting blood drawn or in agonizing pain or just devastated for whatever reason, I imagine a bright brilliant field full of tall green grass bending in a light breeze and monarch butterflies floating in the air. I imagine a warm sunny day, clear baby blue sky, white cotton candy clouds drifting across the sky. The field is full of wildflowers with colorful blossoms and green leaves, and they too bend and float in the cool breeze. Sometimes, if I am really struggling, I even envision a bit of lens flare in my mind like I am taking a picture or making a video but there is no camera, no recording device, just me and my neutral thoughts and my imagination soothing my troubled mind. Then I can take a deep breath and relax. Wherever I go is a safe place and I spend time there, unfazed by whatever ails me.

I did not know where I was going but I knew that I would know when I got there. I was driving on back roads through the countryside for two hours when I finally admitted to myself that I was lost.

I had thrown my cell phone out of the window when I first got on the highway and watched in the side view mirror as it shattered into pieces upon impact with the road and was then run over by the car that came up behind me. So quickly I had no maps, no GPS capabilities. I had a paper atlas map and only pulled over to glance at it after those two hours—it may have been longer. I was not looking at the clock. I was just driving. Driving through the countryside, unknown to me for I had never been that way before, enjoying listening to my randomized playlist and hearing new music for the first time.

I put on Keane, Perfect Symmetry and listened to it on repeat. It was 2009 all over again. That was the last time I had tossed a cell phone out of my window while driving down the highway. I had gone from the beach in Georgia to the mountains in North Carolina and everywhere in between. I had experienced a relentless paranoia that would not let me rest even though I stayed overnight in a hotel room. I could not stop driving. The week had ended with a return to my parent's home and an involuntary trip to a psych ward. Live and learn.

This time around, I opened the map and could not make sense of it. I stayed on the backroads and drove past fields filled with grazing horses and donkeys, cows, goats, sheep. There were houses, of course, and derelict gas stations and small strip malls on streets. All the sights filled me with a sense of calm and panic. There was proof of civilization. I could not be too far from the highway. However, I was in an unknown territory and knew no one and nothing about where I found myself. I did not want to stop the car, so I kept driving.

I had left my house in the early morning, when the sun was just rising over the black trees. It was late morning when I realized I was lost. Was I really lost or was it just that I no longer had a cellphone? I decided it was the later. I came to a four-way intersection with stop signs and had to make a choice. Should I go straight or turn right or left? The poem from Robert Frost popped up in my head. But this was three paths not two. All directions looked about the same. Vast fields of farmlands and rural country houses. It occurred to me that if I stopped to ask for directions at the wrong country house I might never make it home again. While I am not a true crime buff by any means, I know that all it takes is being at the wrong place at the wrong time for something dire to happen. And I do not always have the best luck.

I turned right and found the road eventually dipped into a swamp land surrounded by Spanish moss trees with the Spanish moss hanging from the branches like weird wigs. The trees blotted out the sunshine, and it became darker. It reminded me of the scene in Beauty and the Beast when the father rides his horse through the dark woods and ends up at the haunted castle because of getting lost. All sorts of scenes played out in my mind now that I was without my phone. But I had to throw it out the window. I was certain that I was always being tracked. I could not take it anymore. And now, I was free.

But I felt the pull of my digital attachment to the phone. It was the feeling of having forgotten something important or being naked. I had relied so much on that rectangular doom box of glass and plastic. Some might say that I was only suffering from a psychotic break with reality and that I was extremely paranoid. But that is not true.

I finally saw the truth of all things. I saw that there was a magnetic stripe on plastic credit cards and that if the power went out, they would cease to work. I saw that all the big tech companies—those billion-dollar behemoths and protected entities—were all governed by a single solitary logo. And that each logo was representing the same one thing. I saw that there was a thin veneer of politeness covering over all human civilization and that at any moment the whole thing was susceptible to break apart, cracking fissures, tectonic plates shifting to fault lines and network failures. We were specks of dust on the back of a marble, rolling through infinite space.

I had to reign in my understanding of God as I understood him. I call God him because it is easier to say that than to try to explain that God must be every gender and no gender all at the same time, if we are made in his image, like the Bible says. But there is so much I do not know. I do not even know if I believe in God. I want to believe in something that knows me intimately in the universe. But I must admit that I do not know what I believe. Every time I know something, I am shown that I do not know it at all.

I drove through a swamp land that eventually turned into a nature preserve. I looped around it on a sun-bleached dirt road and saw alligators and herons and black birds cawing in the trees.

I drove for several more hours, without stopping and realized I was on a road that did not end. It was my supernatural ambition. It was my energy level. It was my awareness. It kept me going.

Finally, I came to a small town, whatever that place was and saw an old white wooden structure. It had steps leading up to a front porch that wrapped around both sides.

I parked beside the white house and got out of my car. There was a boy sitting on a bench out front on the wide wooden porch, gnawing on his hand and drooling. He was hunched over and muttering inaudible words. A big country man came out of the white building and said, can I help you? In a booming voice.

Yes. Can you please tell me how to get back on the highway from here? I asked, quietly.

He regarded me for a moment. He was tall and round and he wore black suspenders over a white button up oxford shirt and black slacks and shiny black shoes. Then I could smell formaldehyde and realized I had walked up the steps to a funeral home.

The man said yes and began to tell me the way back to the highway. I had no clue where I was and did not really need to know the name of the town, so I did not ask.

He pointed to the street out front and gave me some directions. I thanked him and walked back to my car.

Not having a phone was exhilarating and terrifying.

I drove away from the funeral home and out of the small town which boasted an auto mechanic and some small wood houses and that was all I could really see of the place.

I was eager to get back on the highway. I knew that once I got back on the highway, I would be able to figure out what direction I was going in. But I must have missed the turn off for the highway because I stayed on that road going through dark fields and dark houses and then, after a while, the houses began to disappear from my periphery and all that remained was the road, stretching on before me for unknown miles, and fields of green grass on either side of it. The land was flat with some rolling hills in the distances, and I assumed that eventually I would find a town, a city, a corporation, anything that would give me a sense of where I was going now. But that never happened.

I pulled over on the road to look at the paper map and try and make sense of the spiderwebs of blue and red lines crisscrossing in every direction. But when I opened it, all I saw was an outline of a black circle on white paper.

I must have crossed over a boundary line into an unfamiliar backcountry zone. I was lost. I was not lost if the road was the black line. I was on a circle track, somehow. How I got to it was quite unknown. It did not matter how I arrived at this weird, mystery place. In a way, I had done it to myself when I got rid of the phone. Today, who can live without one? We have gradually become ultra connected to the world and pinned down to a precise set of coordinates with our locations on. To go off the grid…Yahoo! I had gone off the grid, Indeed.

Now I was driving on this road with no end. I had yet to see anything truly remarkable or interesting, though. The endless rolling fields of grass were a sort of movie style backdrop for my intense desire to see something else. I thought about Walt Whitman and his blade of grass. There was a lesson in it all somewhere.

I pulled back on the road and went on.

When it got dark, I pulled over and slept in the car.

The next morning, I drove forward on the road which I was now calling Spirit Road for it seemed to have transcended the earthly plane though composed of everything that makes a classic road, even had the dotted white lines and yet, there was nothing ordinary about it. It was as if I had driven through a portal into another dimension. The road was there, every bit a typical and well-maintained or new road. There were even speed limit signs posted every so often announcing that 40 MPH was the limit. As I drove on, the speed limit increased to 50. I went 50.

I wanted a cup of coffee to keep me up but there were no houses, no stores, no restaurants.

I drove on and occasionally, saw a split rail fence that I took to be a good sign. Somehow, I knew that if I turned around and went back the way I had come from, I might find nothing in that direction too.

It was the weird derelict antique town and the big man from the funeral home that told me which way to go. I assumed that it was my fault, that I had somehow missed the turn off for the highway, but now I was beginning to wonder if it had been my drive through that dusty town that put me on Spirit Road.

Just when I began to think I could find my way back somehow, or push on forward to the next place, and just when I craved the sight of a Walmart or a bustling metropolis I remembered the map and how I had been lost looking for the road I was on, but I had not known the name of the road I was on and so named it myself.

The map had changed. There was no way around that fact. What I had always taken for granted—that anything printed on paper will stay put and never change—had become an intense exercise in metaphysical transcendence and metamorphosis. The map had changed. And now I was no longer lost. I was on a road to nowhere or perhaps it would take me somewhere as I circled the globe between green rolling hills dotted with wildflowers and now, a big tree.

As I rounded a bend, for the road was often like a möbius strip or even an infinity symbol…I saw the tree. It was in the distance on the left side of the road sticking up from the green grass of the earth (although I now questioned grass—what was it?) like a guard of the liminal space or a sign that the liminal space had come to an end. I had brought a couple gallon jugs of water and seeing the tree made me pull to the side of the road, stop the car, and drink some water. Then I got out of the car, did not bother to lock it behind me, and reached into my pocket again for my vanished smartphone.

I walked towards the tree, stomping through the tall grass that was bending under a cool breeze. A message from Mother Earth to tell me, you are not alone.

I care about trees. I want to see them thriving. I have been an activist for the rights of trees back home. Whenever trees were slated for destruction, I tried to help my local community of environmental conservation comrades as we fought in nonviolent ways to protect the trees and stop the deforestation efforts that were taking place and wiping out so much of the wildlife. Even though we were able to delay their efforts, to protect the forests for a time, we were always up against the developers' endless streams of funding. But then, after we lost a battle, I would notice how the trees were protecting me. Whether it be the roof over my head or the paper in books I was reading. Or just the shade provided by the branches full of leaves when I was swinging in a hammock between two trees on a sunny day. The atlas was made from a tree.

And now there was this ancient sycamore tree. Or at least it looked like an ancient sycamore, but I did not really know what it was. It could have been anything if I had passed through the normal three-dimensional Euclidean space time realm into a different dimension.

The tree grabbed a hold of me from the distance and pulled me towards it. I could feel a sense of relief from pain and a slight pressure exerted on my solar plexus and my crown chakra. The tree had something to say, to show me.

I came near it and kept my distance before I felt okay to go up closer and touch the mottled bark. I felt a charge of energy pulse through my palm into my body. This was the Spirit Road tree.

Suddenly I was feeling regretful. I knew it was just my subconscious working something out. The tree was a stable force and although it appeared to be standing still and not moving, I knew that it was moving—just in a way so slight that my naked eye could not perceive its motion. I regretted the times I had lied to people. I regretted the times I had looked at pornography with lust in my heart. I regretted the times I was selfish and self obsessed. The times when I stole what did not belong to me from corporations (never from individuals or small businesses). The times when I was mean spirited or cruel, although those times were few. I regretted not doing more. More service work, more giving generously, more kindness to strangers…

I stood under the shade of the sycamore and wrapped my arms around the trunk and felt my face, scrapped a little by the bark, though it was mostly soft, just firm, like a thick kind of paper.

I felt the tree hug me back. I was touching an ancient being in an unknown place. I was alive. Charged with clear purpose and unconditional love and good intentions.

After a while, I thanked the tree, and went back to the car, got in, and pulled back onto the endless road. I was amazed when I reached for my phone again. I had not known how addicted I was to that black mirror. I glanced at the map again.

Map: black outline of an infinity symbol, like an elongated figure eight.

I flipped the page.

Map: a collection of every selfie I ever took.

Ah, an inner exterior map. Haha.

I lost the desire for water, for sleep. I was not afraid of this land of purgatory. I was on the road trip of my life. New directions. Choices. I went another way. I drove across a glass bridge that disappeared as I passed over it and made my way across the globe. I drove through ghost towns and ancient cities, empty of people. I could drive forever without that phone tethering me to towers.