ONE STEP AT A TIME

It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass. It has been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering. We had crossed the mountains that day, and now we were in a strange place.

Annie Dillard -- 'Total Eclipse'

Sunday Morning trip to Powell's books, picking up a couple of travel books for my friend in Ecuador. Browsing through several sections for something to take for myself. Rumi? Gracia Marquz? Annie Dillard came into my mind, so I picked up a compilations of her work. The first paragraph struck me, and I settled on it.

Much like traveling. Going to an unknown time and place. The death of something, the birth of somethings new. Like my move to Portland Oregon over 14 years ago. Four days, driving across country with a few meager possessions in back of my truck. Some boxes of odds and ends, clothes, a few books. A dresser was about the only piece of furniture. During the drive I continued with my fevers which would start up in the afternoons, and increase to 101 or 102 by the time I'd find a cheap hotel for the night. It was irrational. It was the death of someone. It was in some ways going into the region of dread, knowing that I might be dead by the end of the year.

Looking back, I want to say I was totally at peace, that I welcomed and embraced everything that would come. That I had no sleepless nights. But it was tough. All I knew is that I did not want to live the few months I had left in South Carolina. And I did not want to die in the place where I was born, where I felt no longer safe. I was willing to risk going into the unknown, even the dread of it for the chance, the hope of something better.

How many times in history has that happened? Where people have traveled across continents, across oceans, in the hope of the unknown, knowing the risk, knowing the dread, but driven from the intolerable, to jump off the edge of a cliff, falling, falling, sliding, down, down. Hoping to at the least to come to rest, in a new strange place, the potential, the possibility. Of? The just maybe, maybe....

Sliding, I come to a halt, take a breath, and slowly, slowly, open my eyes....