A third morning of an alarm buzzing at five am was a slight challenge. But I rolled myself forcefully out of bed and zipped around my hotel room in a rush to gather everything and get to the car. By the time I found coffee, my eyes were wide in the predawn darkness and once again, I was heartily, deeply thankful to hold tryst with the shadows. The quiet, the all-enveloping hush of my lone self in my lone car on that looping black road at dawn, it is an experience that reaches down to the deep places in me. Lets out the thoughts and half-known hungers that lurk below my every day mind.
God, Creator, Redeemer, His presence is with me in these early hours and I find myself passionate in prayer, yearning for His presence, my eyes attuned to His beauty in the gathering light around me. Out here, whizzing past fields and hills and valleys, the scope of my idea of God expands once again, and for a little while, I feel the cool of air in my soul from the new space created. The mundanity of modern living sometimes causes my sky to shrivel up, and my view of life to become so small. Travel shatters the smallness, opens up the sky again so that I can think broadly and deeply of God and the life He lives through me. I think I will look back at some of these dawn drives with God as telling instances in my life.
At lunchtime, I entered the edge of New York and found myself almost living one of the masterpieces done by the Hudson River Valley School of artists. I was only skirting the edge of the Adirondacks, but the dark, forested hillsides cropped up to the North just as they did in the pictures I saw. They soon grew into respectable foothills with dappled valleys halfway up their sides and forests of tall, swaying trees with newly made gold. I remember when my friend Gwen and I saw the pictures in a Museum in Nashville, we wondered at the fine foliage depicted, at the fine play of light round the leaves and the ideal look of the mountainous clouds. I thought perhaps it was a bit of idealistic artistic interpretation but there it was, the living, breathing glory those old paintings right before my eyes. The mere sight is enough to make one want to be a painter on the spot.
My goal for that day was to get to Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst by two o clock. With much glancing at maps and hurried acceleration I managed to make it and found myself pulling up at 210 Main Street right at two and I made it just in time for the tour. The house itself was quickly seen as there is really very little left of her personal belongings or even pictures of her. At first, I felt disappointed that there wasn’t more to find, but the more I heard and thought about her life, the more I felt that this was somehow in keeping with her nature. I’ve heard of her as a recluse, an introspective poet who removed herself from society from some sort of disappointment or grudge against the world. Tisn’t true. From what I have learned, she grew up in a socially central home, her father being quite the leader in town. Her seclusion began as she grew into her late twenties and was gradual, one party missed, one Sunday spent at home. She began by simply shunning those things she felt were useless or vain, and ended up with the decision to live her life by her own thought, and she felt she could think best in the quiet circles of her Amherst home. When she died, it was discovered that she had turned those thinking hours into over eighteen hundred poems; poems now renowned for their beauty, their tightly woven thought, their insight into the world. Even after her death, she is still somewhat mysterious to all who read her work, but the thoughts she chose to spend her life on remain powerfully present. Her thoughts are her legacy and it seems in keeping with the way she lived her life.
I could have spent so much longer there, but the day was running fast away and I had to hurry to Boston to pick up my beloved friend Anna who agreed to join me for two weeks of this crazy northeastern jaunt. After twice circling the hectically busy, crazily signposted airport, I managed to spot Anna’s curly hair and familiar scarf and we both squealed with excitement on the spot. We battled our way through the Boston afternoon traffic to finally arrive on a quiet back street of Andover where our friends the Bilazarians live.
Four doors down from the home where Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we found the grand old Victorian home that the Bilazarian’s are renovating. They welcomed us like queens even amidst the last hammers and drill buzzings of the day and hurried us down to their nook of a kitchen for curried chicken and a crispy flatbread dinner. They are a high-energy, exciting family and ideas are always in the air at their house. But after a lovely meal, we were glad to fall into bed. This adventuring is exhausting stuff!
