For Victoria: the one I left behind, for now.

Beyond the motel window dawn breaks on the final day. What will it bring?

At first, it’s the same; here Mt. Antero looms at 14,276 feet, way above my head.

The shape of Antero reminded me of climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, long ago, of the links of past and present and if travel were a passage way between them.

What is this idea of the road and its romance? Freedom, escape, wandering, discovery, journeys both internal and beyond. Celebrating the impromtu and improvised, the unfamiliar and mysterious. John Ford knew the road warrior, and the seeker, didn’t belong: they were too driven or restless to settle down, amd John Wayne watches the closing door exclude him at journey’s end in The Searchers.

The two lane blacktop gives way to the concrete freeway and a familiar, crowded world: Denver, 30 miles to Boulder.

I feel tired, exhilerated, awakened and exhausted. We’re told we’re social animals but how so? As bands of roving gatherers or clusters of city and town folk?

Paleo diets return us the days of hunters and gathers but maybe not their intimate relation with the spirit world.

Entering Boulder, street lights and other amenities. Rain. The mountains just beyond.

I am a settled one, basically. But with a thirst for something more. Community and place are where intimacy with and commitment to others flourish. Wandering and travel brings a sharper focus to an inner need for something else. Settlements sustain and have for millenia. And when they don’t, when I feel the need to seek and discover something beyond the settlement door, I hear the romance of the road beckon.

The Univeristy of Colorado at Boulder: numbers galore. Small testimony to the tension between the one and the many.

Freud realized that we paid a heavy price sexually for the retraints civilization imposes on our inherent polymorphous perversity. I wonder if it doesn’t exact a cost spiritually as well.

I take my car to a car wash to clear away the residue of the long road taken.

Near my new residence. Wash, clean up, cleanse.

Spiritual seekers have often been wanderers, entering the wilderness, undertaking journeys and quests. Be it Jesus or the Buddha, or so many other saints and gurus, it strikes me that the seeker seeks something profoundly personal and spiritual and that it is the followers who settle for a religion they can sink into more stable soil.

A pamphlet in the car wash waiting area. A shock. And reminder of what our settled ways produce as suffering and loss, along with the dramatics of helping the casualities of a failed community.

I have arrived. I need to settle down, settle in, maybe just settle. And wonder if this is where I need to rediscover that spiritual quality so much more evident on the road.

My car emerges, clean. And what I write and what I see, text and image, diverge most strikingly in this final post from the road. Why?