Musings

I’m currently reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s new book, An Altar in the World.  It appears a quick read, but in typical style, reading even a single sentence requires no small amount of “chewing” on my part, and so I’m taking my time slowly with this book.

In one of the chapters I just finished, she talks about how much more she feels connected to God through the natural world by simply being observant.  As I left Conference Meeting this morning, I had a lot on my mind from the past weekend.  I feel reconnected with my church after almost a year now in Chicago, and definitely more connected with the UCC form of church in Wisconsin.  I was thinking of the many conversations I had — with people like Don Niederfrank, my mentor and minister at St. John’s UCC in Random Lake; Eliza and Shaun, fellow In Care-ians in crime; Bridget, Andrew, Lee, Kathy, Mary Ann, and Walt from Plymouth; the sizeable number of us using Macs of varied stripes and colors — and I wanted to think and process without distraction as I drove.  Our theme this weekend was “Living Grace-fully” and centered around creation care and observance, so it connected with Altar in a unique way, too.

So I turned off the radio.  Thanks to a dead rodent in the fan which gets removed tomorrow, and because of the beautiful day outside, I had my windows open.  Highway 23 takes one through a number of small towns on its way back to Highway 45 to Milwaukee and points south (WARNING: Do not drive even a mile over the speed limit around Rosendale! A number of Conference attendees, though surprisingly not myself, will attest to negative experiences after speeding up before the speed limit officially changed…) and I was mostly on auto pilot.  It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon for a drive, and the highway-town-highway-town rhythm followed my own up-and-down thought pattern.

Then it happened: I began to hear the birds as I drove.  I could smell the east-central Wisconsin pine attempt to cover up the decomposing creature lodged in my fan.  I noticed the way people would walk along the sidewalk as I drove along the edge of downtown Ripon: leisurely, without the pressure of an impending appointment, appearing as if they’d be just happy to strike up a conversation about the weather if I had been walking down their same route.  I noticed the way the driver in the car behind me was less than pleased at having to stop at the red light, anxiously ratting on the steering wheel with their hands.  I saw how the sunlight seemed to dance off the metal pole barn in the places where peeling paint left exposed shiny silver.

As I sat in the drive-thru lane at the Arby’s I heard the quiet purr of my idle engine bounce off the wall, the background noises in the kitchen through the worker’s intercom headset.  I looked at how this was the absolute edge of the town, nothing but a forested wall out the other side of my car, providing protection to the unknown space beyond.

I met up with a few friends in Kenosha, first to do some quick shopping and then coffee downtown on the lake.  I noticed how the boats seemed to crawl out of the harbor, past the lighthouse and into Lake Michigan, leaving a small wake along their path.  The warm sun and the cool breeze — without the former it would have been too cold to sit on the patio, without the latter it would have been too warm — cooperating in a way that seemed to whisper, “Come, grow.  Experience life.”

This meditative tour continued as I left for my last leg back to Illinois.  When I entered the tollway, the concrete barriers made me feel trapped, and the impending line of red taillights were like a screaming in my ears, “No!  This is too much artificiality, too much speed where speed is no good.”  I felt a little wasteful paying the Waukegan toll and exiting right away at Gurnee, but I was compelled to do so.  I passed Highway 41, and I heard that same voice tell me, “Don’t turn here, keep going.”  And so I did, passing Green Bay Rd. on my journey.  I came to Sheridan Rd., the easternmost roadway throughout much of northeastern Illinois and southeastern Wisconsin, gently weaving its way no more than half a mile from the Lake Michigan shoreline.  “This is where you turn now,” and so I did.  What normally is an hour, hour-and-a-half trip from Kenosha to my apartment turned into three more hours in this meditative space.

Its funny to think of my car as meditative space.  Its ordinary, plain.  No one would call a 2006 Chevrolet Aveo with dead vermin lodged inside it a luxurious surrounding, and especially not considering that I “live in my car” with the back seat occupied by materials from a retreat back in the early spring and other random trinkets accumulated in a long-overdue cleaning and the front seat littered with trash from breakfast granola bars and too-frequent stops in drive-thru lanes.  Its not an easy place to just zone out, either: us manual transmission drivers are engaged in four-limb driving, deftly maneuvering and manipulating pedals and gearshifts all but forgotten in the past three decades.

But today, it was.  Void of just one everyday distraction — normally one I consider so indispensible that my iPod is rarely far from my side — I was able to simply be with my traveling soul, to be at least somewhat present with this earthly home of mine.  When I finally arrived in my apartment parking lot, part of me didn’t want to leave that space.  (The Kenosha coffeehouse stop, coupled with the tub of Diet Pepsi I had with my Arby’s order, mandated a quick departure nonetheless.)  I doubt it will ever hold the same feeling again, but for this afternoon, it became a sacred space.