Crossing Nebraska

I suspect that anyone who’s lived an appreciable number of years will have come to know that darkest of places that we can know – with life as we’ve known it but a fast-fading memory, and life as we think it will be forevermore seeming like the darkest, coldest hell that can ever be imagined. Do you know this place of which I speak – the Void ? I was still a teenager when I first encountered it. Whatever Christian faith I’d known up to that point had crumbled and I’d not yet cultivated much of anything to take its place. In that place of in-betweenness was everything abhorrent to the human mind: meaninglessness, aloneness, joylessness… Some might be quick to refer to such an experience as “ the dark night of the soul ”; but to label it as such is at once to minimize it. For to assume that one’s soul is experiencing some tribulation that will eventually bring it closer to God, or to oneness, or to whatever it is that one might still believe in is to presume that there is ...

Some years ago, with my future entirely up in the air, I loaded my bike and some gear into the back of a rented car and headed west. At the time I had only the sparsest of itineraries and no real time frame to speak of. Yes, I would return the rental car to a certain place on a certain date and, yes, I would then cycle out to the coast before meandering back home. With the exception of those few parameters, however, everything was up in the air. The route that I would take, the challenges and the people that I would meet, the despair and joy and insights that would arise along the way – these were all just aspects of an awesome mystery unfolding moment by moment, and I with it. In my more enlightened moments I’m able to see that all of life is like that, and that realization fills me with great joy. Ah, but in my dark and small-minded moments I manage to forget it all. It’s funny how great truths can so easily be forgotten. Speaking of great truths… I remember the first time I b...