A Part of All I Have Met

I grew up with the words of Tennyson's "Ulysses"

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.

The Parkway is a place where that margin fades ceaselessly.
Whether I am driving in my car or sitting at an overlook or hiking along the Mountain to Sea Trail or sitting atop Balsam Knob, something new is always coming into view.

When I am driving I see the vistas and the changing trees. I learn again and again that every day they are moving a little bit deeper into the season or moving out of it. When I'm sitting, I realize that the longer I gaze out, the more appears to me, as though happy I am paying attention. The margin is never fixed, unless I am so stubbornly fixed within myself, my own problems, that I am not looking in the right way. But when my eyes are open, when my heart is open, I understand exactly what Tennyson is talking about, more and more when I move.

Loving the Blue Ridge Parkway

How does a person come to love a road?

For a time I don't think I knew I was in love. It was a part of the world, and like other parts of the world it was a place where things happened. I loved or hated the things that happened, but I didn't actually blame or credit the place for the experience. But something happens in our memory--place becomes as vital, as time passes, to experience as the people involved.

As I get older, I've come to see such places as being as much a part of my life as the things that happened there. It becomes physical setting in the same way that the physical body is a setting for the emotions that go on inside of us. Are our internal experiences of being alive separable from our bodies? Are events separable from the places where they occur? I don't think so. And I think the this is why some places become "sacred" to us, for how integral they become to the story of our lives. Places become extensions of us, as much as we become extensions of places.