When the highways sleep

(View from the passenger seat in Mike's car)

Foggy days are often described as eerie or gloomy, but to me they have always felt safe.

A misty landscape has a quality that makes you want to whisper. It’s partly because of the stillness that inspires reverence, and partly because the world seems asleep and you don’t want to disturb it. It’s also because your surroundings are playing hide and seek, and you don’t want them to hear you approaching. Fog is what happens when nature decides to become a puzzle or perform a vaporous striptease. It’s a game in the same way that changing leaves are dress-up.

Photos of the fog never seem to do it justice, because it irons it out onto a flat surface. This cloudiness is anything but flat. It was never meant to be confined to a two-dimensional space.

Like snow, fog is compared to a blanket, but it’s different than the blanket that snow provides. Snow is static, while mist is in constant motion. It lets you enter and shows you things if it trusts you. The view becomes crisper as you move close. You earn it, like getting to know someone who is usually guarded.

Any light in the haze looks ethereal, even if it’s from cars on the highway. They’re like alien fireflies. This kind of fog makes the highways seem so stark; a near-abandoned alternate world. Every trip out is an adventure in discovering old things in a new light.

Lights become guides, and the sky turns into a milky ocean with a moon eye. It’s unseeing and draws you closer with the tides. Indiscriminately, it draws everything home.

Driving through mist can make you feel embryonic. It’s safe in the way confined spaces are. Of course, mist doesn’t really confine a space by veiling most of it. It just creates that sense while opening more possibilities.
                Many times I feel like I’m walking through a fog in a world of my own. When there’s a tangible fog embracing the landscape, I’m not alone. Everyone is in that same space with me, exploring together. We're in an all-enveloping cocoon, waiting while our surroundings evolve and then finally resurface.

The cycle

Raindrops on a window split apart and join together, mimicking both mitosis and its opposite. They depict life's origins. They show both the return to our beginnings and our separation from them as we forge new identities. Throughout our lives we stray from our roots and return to them over and over again.

Rains feeds the ocean, the subconscious mind, full of murkiness and unfamiliar things we come to recognize. The subconscious gives birth to conscious ideas, like aquatic creatures evolving to dwell on land.
               Both conscious and subconscious thoughts have life cycles. They're born, feed off of other thoughts, breed further notions, and pass on. Sometimes they're reincarnated as more evolved ideas and then materialize as more raindrops on the window.

My dreams are becoming more Freudian.

Last night I dreamed about an anxious mind taking the form of a haunted house. Each room was a separate lobe in the brain representing its own fear or memory. The doors that connected them were linked thoughts.
              I guess we do carry our homes around, but we don't always have to be stuck in the same rooms. We can renovate.

Infusion

One from the archives. I wrote this in January of 2012.

*    *    *

             When you find yourself observing a new place, you absorb the essence of it. As this happens, you either perceive a presence or an absence. Spirit is presence; a perpetual emotional imprint.

            The words of a book are infused with spirit. Long-dead authors continue to speak. Their chorus arcs and curves along the space-time continuum, collectively dancing its verbal ballet. Living writers are also partly encompassed within their works, but not bottled up inside. A tome is not a tomb. Books preserve their authors, rather than contain them.

            Written exchanges also hold spirit. Messages are scrawled on bathroom walls; words traded between strangers. These conversations retain their vitality and awaken every time they are read.

            Everything that has ever been touched emanates spirit. We connect with others through a chain of shared objects, laying hands on one another vicariously.

            All songs have spirit. Born in the composer’s imagination, the brainchild is adopted by those who hear it. Each note sounds different to each ear. The musician’s intentions and the listener’s impressions all dwell in the tune. In this rich variance, it thrives. The notes stem from one seed, and then flourish into countless branches bearing fruits of inspiration.

            Spirit permeates nature. Trees harbor remembrance of everyone they encounter. Silent witnesses to centuries, they sustain the birds nesting on their boughs, squirrels burrowing into their crevices, and humans etching memories into their bark.

            Foggy days are rife with spirit. Mist juxtaposes against crisp cityscapes, suffusing our reality with haze. Even if we can’t see the mist, we feel it in rooms that balloon with presence, like lungs inhaling a breath.

            Ghost is the inverse of spirit. It is hollowness and hunger. A ghost is the silence between words; the empty space between objects.

            An abandoned house is a ghost. Parts of it contain spirit because it has been touched and experienced, but altogether it is a husk. It lacks any tokens of the former residents. They don’t linger in the edifice; it lingers in them. They gave it any sense of character it acquired, and this cannot be severed from themselves. When they depart, so goes the home.

            A ghost is a missed opportunity. It abides in a 24-hour diner with a buzzing neon sign, sipping coffee with a man who sits alone. He recalls the woman who once sat across from him; how they were enmeshed in conversation until 3 a.m. It was a biological destiny. Their DNA codes cracked the combination lock to a shared mental universe; an ecstatic neurochemical tango. Their steps were in perfect rhythm with the dance of written words.

            A ghost is left in your wake if you do not share your life with others. Instead of a mark, a void remains. This happens when you seal yourself up in a snow globe and refuse to be shaken. Your mind becomes a bubble expanding with self-contained knowledge. When you’re gone, all you’ve ever learned passes away with you.

            I’d like to think that if we share ourselves, we impart on the world after we die. This means that we won’t be anywhere, because we’ll be everywhere. I believe that when this takes place we are not present; we are presence. We disperse and transform into everything we have ever touched, written, read, sung, built, drawn, and loved.

           Instead of vanishing from the world, we become it.