High Lonesome Coyote Highway
The straight shot across Nevada
There is a little traveled road between Lost Wages Nevada and Jackpot that runs in more or less a straight line. It is miles from anywhere, and driving it affords much time for deep contemplation. Ridiculous human audacity lay 500 miles of asphalt across this pristine desert. Radio is awful and its too far out to stream the digital, so I sit quiet and watch a magnificent world unfold at 80 mph.
Massive mountains rise East and West of the road. Thirty mile vista’s are routine. The scale of the place is collossal - planetary. Clouds swirl north east, pile high against the mountains, get heavy with moisture. They look like alien battle cruisers trailing snowy virga. Groves of cottonwood line infrequent creek bottoms. Juniper gives way to pinon and mesquite. Cactus disappears. The sky is cerulean blue between racing cloud cruisers.
An hour or two of this and I'm lost in ecstatic driveway meditation - truck humming, cruise control controlling, thoughts float, vaporize. One notion gets stuck…is more intuition than rational thought. Its this - what if the entire scene, all of this magnificence, this beauty, these mountains, these clouds, these trees and bushes - is conscious? Suppose it is all the manifestation of one single spectacular consciousness? Could the energy that is me - now - also be the energy in the mountains, sky, clouds, trees and water? All of it molded by the same universal physical, biological, chemical forces? Are we the same stuff sparking at the same time - one consciousness inter-becoming?
The answer comes….Yes.
I am flabbergasted. This insight can’t be constrained by words, poor language can't grasp it. A rational, logical boundary can’t be drawn around it. It is awareness big as the mountains, fleeting as a cloud, deep as the sky, beyond human. Soul shattering.
I drive on into the orange/purple sunset, enraptured.
The world is made of fierce joy and love. Things grow and change and blossom and thunder because that’s how universal love manifests in the here and now…joyful! If you contemplate any small part of it - that mountain, this tree, the dog at my feet, the rain slanting down, there is beauty and delight. Contemplate all of it, and it’s a fucking miracle.
He was the other side of the road, just across the ditch, camouflaged by thick grey/brown fur. He stood with his head hung low between his shoulders, yellow eyes wary, ready to bolt. For an instant we were eye to eye - plump human trapped in his speeding, stinking contraption of metal and plastic. He - lithe and agile, wild and free, at home.
Coyote loped across his hiway behind me to sing his love to the moon. I sped on into the gathering darkness - high and lonesome - joyful.
