The beauty of travel is not its road but instead the foot of the traveller; not the wind but in the taste on the wind; not the cathedral but the stillness its walls contain, in the cool of water that two hands cup from the river; not in the kiss, but the moment before the kiss, the sweetness of meeting, the poignance of parting; not in the song as it reaches the ear, but when it reaches the heart, or shakes the limbs into dance; not in the fruit but in the body's knowing how fruit sustains; not in sleep but in the freedom of dreams; not in life but in the fine beads of living that comprise it.

I meditate as much to gain a moment's insight as I do to savor their memory. One can be a connoisseur of memories, a master of moments.

My foot moves along the ridgeline. I am at the level on the eaves. Wind has piled snow like a great wave that is about to crash against the shore of my house... but never will. In Ironwood, Michigan, snow falls in great glaciers whose plowed collection will not melt 'til mid-July or August. My foot moves, and I am sitting atop the wave. Below me is a tunnel from our front door to the garage. The hand of the wind constructed it. I love my mother. There is a cherry tree in our back yard; or so I am told. There is a field as large as the sky. My foot moves, and a small stone of snow breaks free and rolls down the face of the drift, carving a path that gravity and my existence described for it. My fingertips are cold; a voice says "come down -- it's dangerous". I smile. I am too young for danger. I edge forward in little hops of my hips. Finally free, I slide down the wave as a winter surfer, and recollection arrives on the ground at the same time as my two feet.

When you walk into memory, anything can happen. Sometimes it is true, sometimes near true, and sometimes simply impossible, no matter what you tell yourself, impossible! There are moments in life that are indelible. Some are described by others with such dramatic difference you wonder if you witnessed the same scene at all. The beauty of travel is how you walked, not where you walked; it is who you walked with, not why you chose this path or that; it is not whom you touched, but who remembers your touch; it is the trail you left behind, and the trail ahead of you, both of which meet right where you are; it is a stone tossed into a lake, with only the expanding ripples to remember it. The stone is still there, even if you can't reach it.

My foot moves along the ridgeline. I am at the level of the clouds. Wind takes my words away from me, so I have to cup my hand to my companions' ears if I wish to be heard; I have nothing to say. The mountain range is a wave that rose up some millions of years ago, and crashes so slowly my entire species may not see it come to shore. Time moves slowly in its sea. I walk on pieces of the wave's spray that every winter has chipped loose, each fleck weighs more than fifty of me. The foam itself, millions of tons. Everything here is measured in millions, if it can be measured at all. Beside me are shadow-peaks white as the drifts of my youth. Below me are trees; far below me are many more trees, and beyond them -- the millions of them -- a road that reaches back to yesterday, to the day and the month before, the year before that, spans states, crosses water, crosses back again, and leans as far as my pearl-strand of memories may take me. I count them like a rosary, I work them like a Buddhist mala. I go round and round with them. They begin to look alike.

The beauty of travel is lost upon arrival; it is not the road but the weight of your body on the road; it is not in the wind but the sighing and crying of voices on the wind; not in the cathedral but what you brought to the cathedral, not in the coolness of water, but how it made gentle the heat of your hands; not in the kiss, but in the impossible distance that exists even between the lovers' reaching lips, the sweetness of trying to meet, the poignance of falling short; not in the song as it reaches for the heart, but in the voice of the singer who does the reaching; not in the fruit, but the body which becomes everything it has ever taken in; not in sleep, but in the room tomorrow builds for you, while you wander through your dreams; the room you enter even if you do not wish to; the beauty of travel not in life, but the fine beads of living that comprise it.

(0)

When you bring a guitar into tune, there is a sound beneath the sound that rises as each string begins to play its neighbor; as the combined harmonics of low and high notes begin to ring together and sustain each other; until the joined voices have filled the body of the instrument, and the whole is in vibration, in chorus.

If what fills me fills the guitar, then that harmony must be joy.

It is almost as if -- beyond my small hopes and small despairs -- that ringing drew all things near it into line with the past and with the future. And those harmonies that were unexpected and unexplained, that were greater than the single string that had been plucked, were evidence of a Spirit that is larger than me myself, larger than you yourself, but somehow the beauty that arises from our combination.

What I love about playing the guitar is that the guitar, in fact, plays me. On the face of it, the statement of a contrarian. The beauty that arises from combination is what calls out the movement of the fingers, the caress of the chord. When a chord is unexpected and larger than one's thought, when it fills the body with harmonics that ring together and reach down into this emotion or that... when one chord leads to another, and the combinations increase... When an A Minor Sustained asks the heart for a little more feeling... then the accumulated sound overflows the breath, the larynx is tuned by the heart, and sometimes -- if you are patient, and very very still -- that vibrating creates a word, and another, until it all spills out unbidden in a song which was created by nothing less than everything outside of you.

Play the chord slowly, each string a distinct face. Play it quickly, and hammer your thumb against the frets. Draw off the fingers so that one emotion falls like water over stone into another... new emotion, old emotion. The next feeling is never unattached from the one which has just passed. Play with a pick and the voice is louder. Play with your fingers, and it is more delicate. Let it be, and the tears can flow up and shower the world with needed water. Let it go, and the laughter can bubble up and overwhelm the losses, as a spring flower always will overwhelm the memory of winter.

This past week I remembered a few songs that had caught me by the heart. It is good instruction to learn to play those tunes. It honors their authors, whose bodies had been borrowed by the muse. It honors the music, that sits in collected memory, waiting for another voice to play it. And it honors and exercises the heart, that carries so much sentiment in its fibers, often without recognition.

The first that came to mind -- how did it come to mind? did someone sign it? did it show up on a radio? -- was Bobby McGee, written by Kris Kristofferson, covered by his then-lover Janis Joplin, covered by others. "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose // nothin' ain't worth nothin', but it's free...". Somehow welcomed again by my guitar. The chords are simple. And as I played it, allowing the lyric to knock around my heart, I heard the sense of the song, and heard it ask for accompaniment, right there, by a harmonica... ahh, I have one...! "Through all kinds of weather, through everything we done // and every night she kept me from the cold..."

The second came like one string harmonizing with the first. "Then trouble's gonna lose me, worry leave me behind // And I'll rise up smiling, with true peace of mind..." Carole King, from her exquisite album Tapestry. "Way over yonder there's a place that I know // where I will find shelter from hunger and cold..."

All from a set of strings, and a humming that begins in the heart.

(0)