Unseen Beauty: A Journal

Freedom

I love the human condition, those larger, less tangible elements that tie us all together. I have my master’s in humanities; the study of culture and of the common elements of experience that touch us all are the things that fascinate me. That love has served me well. In college, we went to Paris for three weeks, and while my fellow students were busy bemoaning the culture shock, I was thriving. Others complained about how they were mistreated because of their nationality – everyone thought I was British, and I got along wonderfully. But in some ways, I am proudly and quintessentially American. Take, for example, my utter agreement with the American icon of the automobile as the symbol of personal freedom.

I grew up on wheels, so to speak. My parents were equally dedicated to living in the country and to providing their child with educational experiences and culture. Those two goals combined to fill my childhood with road trips. To this day, being half-awakened and lifted into a nest of blankets in the back seat of a car is a warmly positive memory for me. I got my license as soon as I turned 16, and my high school life revolved around the liberty to go find food, shopping, and adventure. In college, the brightest moments of my undergraduate life were found on four wheels.

One of those moments is seared in memory; it was one of those timeless instants of joy, realized with crystalline comprehension – one of those moments that we never realize will become prized memories. It was late afternoon, and I had driven four hours from school to see my friend Beth. I was traveling down an unremarkable stretch of Pennsylvania highway, my windows rolled down, my music thrumming through the rush of the wind, and in that moment I found one of those great intangibles of humanity: I found freedom.

That ineffable sense of freedom brings with it a deep seated peace that glows like a mythical treasure in the soul. It is ephemeral, rare, precious, and to be valued when it is found. It is not something I consciously pursue, but when I find it, I cling to it with all the strength of one who all too rarely finds that purity of experience.

I found it last night. It was one of those perfect nights, the breeze soft and cool, cutting through the almost tangible air of the closing afternoon with the promise of the sweet night to come. Overhead, the clouds began to crowd in, their torn-edged shapes dark against the ivory and purple of the fading sky. As I sped homeward through the dimming twilight, the dark outline of the horizon filling the end of the road in front of me, I rolled down the windows, allowing the roaring tide of air to pour into the car, pushing tendrils of hair across my cheeks and into my eyes and mouth. Leaning forward, I twisted the volume knob on the dashboard, raising the rhythms of the music over the rush of the air, and I leaned back, transported, not in time and space, but in soul. There was true freedom there, caught between. Between indoors and out with the soft cushion behind my back and the rough touch of nature against my face, between day and night as I pushed through the twilight world toward the horizon, I was disconnected from all the responsibility and constraint of life. I was in control, the wheel beneath my hands, my self, my soul, caught up in motion and music, gloriously alone and utterly free. It was magic, for those shimmering moments of the journey, it was magic.

It ended, of course, with the safe glow of home and the familiar welcome of love and my dogs. And the ending itself was beautiful. But the beauty of home was all the more willingly received because it wrapped its soft comfort around the glow of a soul that still smelled of the freedom of the wind and music of the road.