West Texas

It is winter. Six-thirty in the morning. We are heading east in west Texas through headlighted cones surrounded by blackness. Cars pass us. We pass signs to Plateau, Michigan Flat, Wild Horse Gulch. The road sucks away the dotted line beside us. Mile posts flash by: 162, 173, 184. The somewhere where I am changes every second. But I do not move. The wheels revolve at their steady 52 miles per hour, crawling across the still earth. But the car does not seem to move. The earth is hurtling through space, bringing the unseen sun toward us at a thousand miles per hour. But the earth does not seem to move. The earth is still in the blackness of this morning. This car is still in the vastness of this landscape. I am still in the silence of this car. But thoughts dance inside my head, all of them wondering: What is the condition of life? A state of motion? Or a state of rest?