It's just shy of one year since the first time I drove this road. It's highway 34, a 12-mile, non-descript connector between the north/south movement of I-5 and the town of Corvallis, before disappearing into the hills and forests west of town on a much more elegant path to the Pacific.
One year. What's happened in that time? How is it even to be measured?
1st grade lasted a lifetime and everything since that has gone by increasingly faster, but that isn't a measure of content. Or is it? I don't know. What causes time to feel full or like it slipped away?
When I first drove this road it made me sick. The fields were their cliche of emptiness and all I could see was the disatance in miles and years from all that I knew and loved.
I'm reading a good book right now called "Letters to a Young Poet" by the author, playright and poet Rainer Rilke. It's simple, heavy and spot on.
"Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves
like locked rooms and like books
that are written in a very foreign tongue.."
One year ago I was filled with disgust and loathing for the farmlands and for this lost town, and last week I noticed some unexpected peace in the one-year annivesary of those same surroundings. Is the feeling of lost time steming from focusing on futures instead of comfortably living the uncertainty of each unknown?
