On the Road to Arizona, Part 2

Blue skies and dreamy clouds welcomed us into Wupatki National Monument.

Travel condenses and intensifies life. Especially the way we do it by doing our best to become intimate with the secrets of areas, even if just passing through. 

Sunday morning’s tragic events will be with me forever. Yet so will the sound of a Kentucky elk bugling at dawn in frosty fields, being stalked by four hungry coyotes on Cape Cod, climbing above the fairy lights of Hot Springs before sunrise, and enchanting scent of ponderosa pine that bejewel this region. There is bitter with the sweet.

As a writer, I find all drama to be grist for the mill. As a person, it’s to be exposed to every feeling. The mythologist Joseph Campbell was interviewed by Bill Moyers for PBS back in the 1980s. Moyers asked Campbell, “What’s the meaning of life?” Campbell responded, “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experienc…