Traveling all of the time

In the last week, I have been to Austin and New York and Brownsville in Texas, and to New York City for the Fourth of July. I have seen the sun set through pine trees and listened to the frogs at night, and looked across the Rio Grande at the palm forests of Mexico. I have watched men in gangster exercise clothes mingle with blondes in sailor dresses on the bus, and marked the shuffling of longhaired, homeless men and women down the street, their carts loaded down with brooms and bags of recyclables. I have spent an hour talking politics with the Border Patrol, and have stood beside the naked force of a flooding creek in the Hill Country. I spent three happy hours driving across Texas in the middle of the night, arguing about culture with my girlfriend. I saw the nest of Pale Male, New York City's only redtail hawk, on the side of a hotel. I belly-laughed at Much Ado About Nothing in the heart of Central Park, and saw TV actors in person for the first time. Did you know famous actors are real people too? I didn’t. I went fishing for crappie on a chocolate brown lake in the peaceful heavy wind of a Southern evening, people-watched on the Promenade in Brooklyn, and drove around a deserted nature preserve at dusk, watchful for illegal immigrants and drug-smugglers. Italian food and the company of friends in the heart of the world’s greatest city, and walking through a thunderstorm on a dirt road, alone. My life has been so full of glorious contradictions lately, I cannot even begin to interpret or digest the meaning of the wonderful sights I have beheld. You know what I am going to do now? Sleep.

When I wake up, maybe I will figure out what I have learned. I don’t know; I suspect I will still be enrapt, in a state of continuous wonder. This world....it is something, something glorious and terrible, a joy and a mystery.