Sept. 2004—"the mantra of motion"

text & photos by Austin Pick

The land unfurls in feathered vapors of paveway heat and the pluming exhalations of smog factories, like two great sweeping manta wings thumbing the horizon in a chromatic flip-book of cloud cartoons, distant ghosts of thought peeling away from the ray of concrete spine, bespeckled with two-ton molecular lozenges hurling themselves ever forward on spindles of exhaust and radio waves, burning thru farmland and forest to close the synapses of cities, always flying.

The mantra of motion flosses my senses: and was it all I really needed, to go the road? So much old dust left behind, mere phantoms. For the rest, housekeeping. Spin the shiney, throw the shroud, cough out the bats from your belfry, get some highway under you...

My grand van hums sweetly, very cozy now too, absurd american turtle-shell to float me around our wide island... And here, my friends, a brief account of recent miles---

I was looking for Silvia. "I came here to drown," she says, sitting by the lake. My heart sinks. But she is sitting with her pad and pencil, here by the lake. She came here "to draw." She came here to draw. It's understandable, with her English, with language. She's Italian, she says English-speakers sound like they've got a potato in their mouth, but she likes me just the same, and I've been a little lonesome now that she's gone back there, to Italy.   And wondering what I meant by going the road alone, living in a van down by wherever.

I met some folks in the backcountry who asked if I was becoming like Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway, if I was intimate with a volleyball or anything. I'd been out for about a month, in various places, always newly-familiar places, pack to back and gone apeeking under the skirt-tails of forest forever receding from all these miles of highway I've driven, a solitude sojourn, less strange but also less sparkling than I'd imagined, and yet so fertile, so full.

Gone apeeking around the edges of conventional mind, get a feel for the scope and dimension of this thing that defines all things in this world of which we are all our own center, step outside the streaming currents of continual distraction, go sit me somewhere with no worries except maybe rain and other animals after my food, watch the movements of mind among the natural cycles of cloud and water wearing mountains down to grit and up again, and that's just it, I guess I was just looking for a better look.

"Gets kinda lonely out here by yourself, don't it?" Someone asked. "Yes," I said, matter-of-factly. But the old sailor understood, better than the hippies in Duluth. We got caught under a pavilion in sudden rain on the shores of Lake Superior, and talked about the landscapes from our particular vantage points, from the land and the lake, from age and from youth, he told me about Berkeley in '67, I told him what I knew about Miami in '03, and what do we do? "Look," he said, "we do what we're doing right now. We meet people, we talk openly, we share, we keep looking. You're driving & walking, I'm sailing with my dog. We carry on just fine."

And so it goes, just like that... My solitude kick drew to a natural end as I rounded down through southern Ontario and docked the vansion at the Toronto-area Vipassana Meditation Centre to serve a meditation course, painting and cooking and so-forth with an unlikely collective --unlikely that we'd be collected there together in such quirky commonality, if the conventional concept of "chance" can still be said to have any meaning... I doubt it. "Coincidences" become the norm.

AND THIS: I've just gotten word that Adbusters will be publishing a short-story of mine in the upcoming issue (#56 I think, due out in about two-weeks). For those who might not know, Adbusters is an internationally-distributed magazine that challenges consumer culture and the capitalist machine driving it, a journal of ideas, debates, activism and news from the grassroots, covering issues like media concentration, geopolitics, and how consumerism is taking us to the brink of ecological collapse. That sort of thing.  

Emaho! The road winds, wildlands north-america unspooling in highway-striped typewriter ribbon, the footfalls of endless moments assembling themselves into an enigmatic and strangely rhythmic series of phrases, blown through the trumpeted funnels of our perception, come acrashing on the shoals of memory, possibly coherent if we read it right... Amazing adventures and Mighty Insightful so far, and this latest windfall Mighty Encouraging, for sure...

I'm in Pennsylvania now, and looking forward to seeing Michael Moore speak in about a week. Then on up to Massachusetts to visit with friends and sit a meditation course, NYC for Halloween and on.  

So I'll be around. Many blessings, friends! Stay Well Stay Wide---

Yours, A

09.28.2004   

Do not imagine that the journey is short; and one must have the heart of a lion to follow this unusual road, for it is very long ... One plods along in a state of amazement, sometimes smiling, sometimes weeping. —Farid ud-Din Attar

Turtle Island (a year on the road): Pt.1 | Pt.2 | Pt.3