His nose was pressed against the window, he scanned the view like a kid in a lolly shop. He turned from time to time to make sure his girlfriend who was sitting in the back of the bus was seeing what he was seeing.Filling his eyes with the landscape I have by now begun to take for granted, he reminded me of myself. The many times my nose has been pressed against a bus in some other country awed by the beauty of Mother Earth. He made me think of a line written by Kerouac and one I have consciously worked to live by since the day my eyes came across it written that “the whole world is a holy place.”
Thinking of Kerouac made me think of my own life lived “on the road” and stirred wistful thoughts of a wide community of dharma bums and beat poets. “The only people for me are the mad ones,” he declared. “The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirious of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
I looked around my backyard and saw that this also is a holy place with food falling from the trees and sprouting in the garden with chooks like spiders scattering by. I pressed my nose against the sky and blessed the road. The road is Life. But sometimes The Road starts off as a path.