small ; wind

Today while I was driving home I realized that there are a lot of cars on the road.

I don’t know how many I saw, but I do know that at every intersection and stop sign and in every parking lot and gas station there were cars. I am fairly certain that there were also a bunch of cars on roads I didn’t see. In Opelika, Mobile, and Birmingham …and for that matter a really big bunch of cars in the great state of Alabama. Next time you drive look at all the cars…are there really stories in all those cars? Lives that have felt the things I have felt? People who have felt alone, peace, joy, neglected, cherished, forgotten, outside and loved?

It’s sad to me when I realize how many lives exist out there. It contradicts with my mom’s feeling that I’m so special. I don’t like idea that to a different life, in a different car; My life is just a car.

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Last Friday I drove past a cemetery. It took me about 7 seconds to drive it’s full length.

How many lives lived did I pass in that seven seconds? How many bodies are in that cemetery? Are there thousands? How many generations are buried there, in that one relatively little cemetery in this small town? How many cemeteries are there in this town? Everything I am, everything I have done and will ever do is so small. So small in fact, that it would be more accurate to call it 0.

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Sometimes when I think about all the lives that have happened and which are currently happening I don’t feel real. I feel like I’m a character in The Truman show or a small piece of a big machine. If nothing is original, is anything real. If nothing is real is there any purpose.

Wind is real.

Wind happens and I can feel it. It touches my skin and hair in the winter and I feel pain. But O how blessed are we that we can FEEL pain. Just to feel proves life. It dances from across the railroad tracks to suburbia and from the mosque to the church and from the mountains to the oceans and from the person next to me to me…and me and strangers get to feel something together…wind is everywhere at once. Wind was there forever ago, and for that matter it was the same wind…and it appears as though it will be there, forever, and I like that. It feels good to see that something can exist apart from time. But my favorite part about wind is that though it’s existence can’t be denied, the only place we can see it is in the reaction of the world to its presence.

And he calmed the wind…