What happens when alone is what all you've got?

If you've been following this blog, you know where I go for comfort. You also know where I had gone for comfort before I figured out that God is not in the refrigerator.

Yesterday I went up the mountain to look for my God. Whether my invention, coping mechanism, crutch or that which is in the eye of the beholder, I choose to believe. Some people need Xena, Xanax or X-box to get through the day, I need something that is often found between some dancing blades of grass.

It was tumultuous on that beastly hump. The winds of change, I call them. It felt like a cataclysmic hurricane. It was foggy and cold and dark, just like my mind. I tried to dig my boot against the rutted etches and the wind insisted I place it on a mound of dung instead. So I climbed, against the wind, against the mounting anxiety and desperation of my heart and mind. Searching between the sweeping sweet peas and the chagrined chamomile, I called for God, for the Divine, for hope, for help.

I heard nothing but the myriah whooshing, whizzing, discombobulating everything that wasn't rooted and I, most absolutely, was not rooted. I kept gripping the ascends, my head bowed to the ground. I wouldn't look up at the grade and degree of the difficulty ahead. I just kept on going. alone. alone. alone. On more lucid days, I know it's just a feeling. But today, no burning bush erupted in miraculous supplication. No sea of grass parted towards a columbine of light. No sagacious inner voice commanding me to do something, was heard.

All I knew was that I was alone, walking with myself, my body fulfilling the task of carrying on, my heart barricaded, my mind, discordant. Alone I went to the "Bad neighborhoods" of my mind. Those wily passages on the road to no good. The tortuous caverns that mermaid sing me into a sinking oblivion, that forgets how good life really is.

I could blame the economy and my prolonged unemployment. I could lament in the severing of my friendship with my ex, which was not by choice on my part. I could bury myself under every brick of heartbreak and heartache, disappointment and and dejection, betrayal and rejection.

Or I could just run down the mountain. Run like the demons that swirl in my head. Run towards the eucalyptus flailing its bark. Run because I can because I can run.

I have no answers, no salvation, no prayers answered. But I do have a bike, and it's windy out there. But today, the sun is shining and the bay will glisten, like my sweat as I race the winds of my mind.