I get to take a little break from my life today and go out on the road with a couple of my girlfriends. An actual road trip with no small people in the back seat asking how much further and chanting "I want out of this car right now!"

Yay!

It's only for two days and it's almost all of it driving, but the truth is I wouldn't care if we didn't stop at all. I love to watch the world through an open window, the way movement makes my mind turn faster and how my spirit feels freer and all my songs come louder to the rhythm of road.

It's a five-hour drive down into Southern Oregon where we are going, down through the northern most tip of the Redwoods and to the coast, and what I remember is how the trees grow more and more impossibly big around the bottom the closer you get to the water.

How I can tilt my head back, look straight up the trunk and everything in my periphery, both directions, is the bark. Up in the canopy is a world that goes on its way oblivious to us, and the smallness it brings in me is perfect. Forty percent of all the world's animals live up the treetops, a hundred feet above the ground.

We're always down here trying to negotiate with the little bits of information we can gather in our limited view. And everything we're in feels so enormous. The weight of tangled personal drama that we can't get high enough above to see where the edges blur out.

I want to climb to the tips of the trees, one branch higher and one branch higher, to where I can see how the pieces all fit together and everything makes sense. Breathe in and understand what it is to be small in the world and the universe and let go of the ways our crippled little vision keeps us trapped in the illusion that our confusion is desperate.