TWO MINDS FOR THE ROAD

Wednesday as I set myself upon Ek Balam's north-running road toward anxious thunderheads and through head-skewering perfumes of flowers, crushed grass and mud my head swam in two oceans.

First, the ocean of being rootless, of being unsure exactly where I was going, no idea where I'd sleep that night, feeling detached from all the world's sanctioned currents, a human for whom humanity has no definite use or pressing concern.

Second, I was feeling the seed in my brain that lately has been hardening and composing itself more beautifully day by day, the thing hinted at by this clumsy and deficient notion: That all us living things are nerve endings for the Creator, who, through what we feel and experience, explores and discovers Her own worth and beauty. And I am more than happy, for Her and myself as well, to FEEL what's at hand.

Suspended in the weblike tension between these two headsets I went onto that road with salty sweat stinging my eyes and found myself exulting in heat, sweat and sting. After some hours my body ached from the heavy load and I found myself inordinately pleased with having a body robust enough to feel and endure it.

My mind, lonely and detached beneath a sky about to rain horizon to horizon and me with no shelter at hand, soared like a spaceship halfway to the Universe's edge, everything around seen by me for the first time and I was filled with the sense of all things evolving, coming together, realizing themselves before my very eyes.

My mind glided, beholding, FEELING for the Creator, feeding what I saw and felt with great gusto into the Universal Central Nervous System, helped along by silent prayers of thanks, thanks for the boiling sky, thanks for the rampant green growth and its photosynthetic poetry, the humid and perfumed air, the vultures in the sky, the heat, the unexpected nice touch of Bizet's Carmen Theme from a thatch-roofed hut along the trail, and this body that just goes on and on, so far...