transit

solar flare
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

This image -- taken months ago with my cameraphone and forgotten in the cameraphone graveyard -- perfectly captures my mood right now, traveling back from Vermont after a friendly round of meetings with folks who were strangers only 48 hours ago.

They have things that need fixing. We told them a little bit how we can make things better. They want to hear more.

I feel useful. Needed. Adequate to the task. Content to be in the company of colleagues who make things like this easy.

And now I'm heading home -- airbound actually, but this pic -- the motion of the tracks, the flare of the sun -- captures the mood of this transit perfectly.

There's something about journeying that lives apart from the things that happen when you get there. Something liminal and in-between; thoughts are sometimes rareified, sometimes dulled, but the hours logged in the air or on the rails or the road are more like the hours logged when you dream than those that populate your waking life.

As long as these rails keep laying down beneath me, and the sun keeps flaring in my eyes, I'm on autopilot for a little while, and can live in these other thoughts that are far from the fears that have been nagging at me since I got the news of my grandmother's hospitalization, the whispered concerns that this might be Alzheimer's, the deep yawning hole of terror that we won't recap our memories anymore, that we won't laugh together, remembering, all that we've done, seen, and shared.

Contrary to all laws of nature my grandmother might forget us more and more as time goes by instead of learning and loving more, as family and dear friends do, as an artifact of that wonderful trick of the mind called memory.

But not yet. I don't have to think about that yet. Because I'm in transit. The rules are different here, and they save me from the knowledge that I cannot be useful in my grandmother's new world. The realization that it's likely that I'm not adequate to this task.