Texas Sunsets

A three and a half hour drive due west through the endless terrain of southern Texas at sunset seems like movement, it seems like progress.  The road ends at the lips of Mexico, in a border town with nothing but dollar general stores and local girl bartenders, all too young for the crows’ feet deepening around their eyes. 

Every week to and from, I make this drive by myself, listening to music and idly talking on the phone about nothing in particular.  It helps pass time now that the novelty of rising hills, scrubby desert and dirt roads (on which to find the footprints of illegal immigrants) has worn off.  There is, however, a dead spot on the drive.  A good forty miles with no cell phone reception. 

This excursion from civilization allows time for my thoughts to spin uninterrupted.  At times, my own apparent boredom with myself reminds me of the quotation from Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, “Epicurus's fool with eternity in hand would probably find listening to the radio the only way to bear it.”  It would seem I’ve allowed my thoughts to lay in the lap of lazy content, making way for foolishness.

As I take in, and try to appreciate, the now familiar view of live oaks twisting towards the heavens with their bare branches, resembling some solidification of loneliness, I remember something I once thought about driving on another freeway in Texas… at another point in the space time continuum all together.

The  original thought was spurred by the memory of a comment made about the lead cames of the stained glass windows.  It was a realization we should all have when witnessing the grandeur of  stained glass at the Cathedral of Beauvais.  Simply put, the lead cames are just as, if not more, important than the colors that lie within its dark lines. 

This reiterated my own thoughts of the church being closed off, absolute and controlling.  There is a set of beliefs and beyond that is only error; a concept I find erroneous and arrogant.  Years later, for the second time, I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the live oaks and their late winter bare arms stretching up and up till they dissipate into sky. 

The darkness flows into the relaxed colors of the Texas sunset, giving the image a sense of definition; a small non-ethereal element to let you know the empyrean is there.  The fingers spread open to the sky.  They are liquid and honest, receptive and giving.  They depict the truth, not a set of solutions to infinite situations.  This is what I believe.

I cannot, or will not, believe in a theory touched by the imperfections and inherent flaws of man as a means by which to live my life.  I can stare for hours at stained glass and see the virtue, see the vibrant colors as just that, vibrant.  I can appreciate that which refuses to appreciate, that which locks down as opposed to lifting up.  But to trade all the beauties of all the sunsets over dismal border towns for one reactionary, manmade artifact would never make sense to me.  It will always be a part of the picture, not the picture itself.

And in trying to alleviate the gravity of thinking in the ethereal, I listen to my radio and drive to Del Rio to go jogging and grocery shopping with all the daytime tourists from Mexico.