Leaving.

You guys I just read the Author's Note from the book Through Painted Deserts. He's one of my favorite authors, Donald Miller who also wrote Blue Like Jazz and Searching for God Know's What. Just these few pages were enough to make me reflect, ponder and inspire something within me that has been damp and left alone for far too long.

Leaving. It's what he discusses and requires his reader to look at- though perhaps through not so skeptical glasses. He states that it doesn't matter where we are from we'd eventually want to leave. If from California- you'd long to head South and become a farmer and if from a farm in the South you'd think of nothing more than heading to the Pacific Ocean which pounds at that California shoreline.

We all have a desire to move, grow, change- if we don't do these things we'll die. Change from boy to teen to man. Change from daughter, to wife, to mother. And in all of these things new experiences take shape, life unfolds, experiences are had. It's not that we're looking for something or trying to uncover some greater reality, but just simply living. Doing and Seeing and Living life.

Chris read this book during the first part of his summer travels, and although I've read Miller's other two books, I've never read this one- but bought it for Chris. I have such a desire to get what it is Chris loves about just going. Just living day-to-day. What is there to like so much about sleeping in the back of a station wagon, eating meat from a can and bathing in the Atlantic Ocean?

I feel like, as Miller reiterates, we live life in visions- cast far out into future. Then when we are thirty, we realize, "wow--- this life is flying by, and really, what is stopping me?"

"Life can not be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath..."

So, based on my husbands recommendation, I'm reading the book. And it's breaking my heart.