I love road trips. Unlike flying in commercial aircraft, (which to me is akin to being enclosed in a Thermos bottle- vacuum sealed and with no true connection to place or the space between places) navigating the roads and exchanging with beings along the way is liberating and enlivening.

Danny Kaye said that, "... to travel is to take a journey into yourself", and it is so.

This week, after a sixteen hundred and some odd mile trek, I find myself under a vast sky that seems to me to invite promise; abreast mountains which encourage my resourcefulness; beside rivers that run so cold and so fast that I am encouraged to, as my grandmother would say, "Keep my wits about me".

Examined or unexamined, a life moves swiftly, and, yes, sometimes cold, but greater respect for, and interaction with nature keeps this wanderer untroubled. By both looking up, looking out, and connecting to people and places with an unaffected exuberance, I find the swiftness dulled and any lingering "cold" banished.