The road less travelled

Sue and I huddled under the covers for a long time this morning, sharing warmth.  We haven't quite figured out the heating in this big, open house.  The kitchen feels as cozy as a pair of wool socks; the adjacent living room chills like a leather ice skate.  Apparently, the ducts in the basement have their own levers and baffles, which send warm air one way or another.  Amidst everything else, we haven't found time to investigate their intricacies.

This evening's sky glowed cerulean, and dangled a delicate crescent moon.  Tonight will be cold again.  The cold, clear nights remind me of the desert.  I've been fortunate to walk under the nighttime desert sky in the UAE and in the Mojave.  The sky in the UAE held a continual haze, which provided ravishing sunsets but sadly muted stars.  The sky in the Mojave, on the other hand, embraced the earth from horizon to horizon with light.

I only managed one night hike in the Mojave.  I set out from my camp below the Kelso Dunes, hiking west along a beaten service road under a waxing moon.  Darkness hid the details of the immediate landscape.  But north and south, the moonlight illuminated the dunes and the Granite Mountains with silver.  With sharp, clean air filling my lungs, I felt disconnected from everything I'd left behind.  Not just my tent and campsite, but the world beyond the horizon, where friends and family held me in their thoughts.

To some extent, I have struggled my whole life with the urge and the need for isolation.  In my first memory, I am standing alone just inside the edge of a forest, looking past a fallen, decaying tree and feeling some call from beyond it.  I have always sought quiet, lonely places.  I still feel that urge nearly every day.  Not an urge to run from something, but lose myself in something else.  I identified very strongly with the young man in "Into the Wild" -- at least as Jon Krakauer presented him.  I am a Contemplative at heart.

But it would be too easy for me to lose myself.  Too selfish.  For me, "the road less travelled" doesn't take me where I'm inclined to go; it takes me where I'd inclined to avoid.  Where's the challenge -- the art of living -- in doing what comes naturally.  For me, the challenge has been to stay, to define a place amidst other people.  To curl up in a warm bed with my wife, rather than follow a moonlit road across the desert.