Smuggling the Universe

An invitation to live poetically

EVERY PERSON HERE, standing beside their cars, is smuggling a universe.

The gas station lights are humming, glowing a world of warmth against the cold night. Moths are suiciding themselves against the neon Miller High Life sign in the iron lined windows.

An old chevy, blood red, drinks, drinks, drinks from the pump beside me. Til it’s full; and the lean man strides across worlds unknown to pay his toll. You can hear the bell cough when he opens the front door, and the blue fluorescent rainbows out onto oil stained pavement.

At the pump across from me, a man unfolds himself out of his black, beat up, boxy Volvo. His sigh sounds like it hurts, like he’s exhaling the scars of the world.

In this small town, at the creep from night to morning, the mechanical pump register spins up numbers like an old slot machine. Ding, ding, ding. Full tank.

You can smell the gasoline as it drips greasy onto fingers and jeans and weeds dying through cracked asphalt.

That walk across the flickering gas station, into the click of dying moths, with the coughing bell, is like crossing a graveyard, and also a delivery room.

INSIDE, brown tile floors are chipped away and stained. Signs are hand painted about cigarettes and coffee and pizza. Each of us, with our universes smuggled behind our sleepy eyes, is waiting in line. Waiting to pay the ferryman.

And more than just a fistful of cash, the man behind the counter, with a salty stubble and green, hungry eyes, wants to know. So, he asks:

“Where’re you heading?”

“Home,” the blood-red-chevy-man says, “to see my kids; and to see my ex.” And he is showing the ferryman pictures from his old, leather wallet. His treasure.

The ferryman takes the coin, takes the story, and says, “Don’t waste it.”

Up next is the man from the burnt-out Volvo, the man with the scar on his sigh, and the ferryman asks him the same question. The door coughs, and a tired, beautiful lady joins the line behind me.

“My mom is sick,” Volvo says. “I’m driving to see her in the hospital.” And he pays his toll. The man hands him some palmful of change, cymbals as they slide into his pocket.

He nods at him. Commissions him into the night. Onto the road.

In between night and morning.

I am next.

“Where’re you headed?”

“To see a girl.” Handing him everything left in my wallet.

The ferryman smiles, says, “I remember those days.”

And as I leave, I hear the tired, beautiful lady behind me tell him she’s moving. “Starting over.”

And as the door coughs closed, I hear him say something about writing a better story.

My car is reborn in the flickering glow of this tucked away place, this place between worlds, this place of converging universes. It vibrates back onto the highway, in the cold of a starlit night. Our lonely blues stretch beneath a crescent moon.

The chevy, the volvo, the beautiful lady, and me, we all bring our stories across the compass rose of Canada’s backroads. We carry worlds of old lives, lives lost, and new lives being found. We are smuggling universes.

MY RIGHT HAND is on the wheel, my left arm leaning against the open window. The radio is singing static and Mr. Tambourine Man, but all you can really hear is the hope of love. All that’s ever on your mind these days is:

The clock is telling me I should be there, to see her, in time to watch the early birds catch their worms. In time to get a coffee. In time to watch her rub the sleep from her eyes.

In time for us to wake up, together.

Passing under the manifesto of so many streetlights, what you do is say a prayer for your fellow travelers. The ones writing their own lives, the ones sharing what comes next with a spark in their eyes and wounds upon their hearts.

The wind is whispering a melody as the evensong is overwhelmed by a breaking day. By a dawn promising, that even after the night, you will be able to see again.

THERE ISN’T A PLACE I go without my notebook and my pen. Not a time in life when words haven’t shaped the world given to me. I think in those pages. My blood is ink.

All of us are on the road. In between Home and what comes next.

Every mile is a sentence. Every stop is a paragraph.

And stopped, there, in front of her place, with a humming car, I scribble part of my own story down; immortalize it.

To remember these days, and to tell about a million lives unseen.

To write the hidden life everlasting.

To invite into worlds unknown.

To live poetically.

That is what it means to be human. To metabolize the world, to see it as God does, to consume it, to offer it as a gift to our neighbor and fellow universe smugglers.

But, we don’t always get it right, do we?

We struggle to see the world like God does. We consume our own image and that of others for our gain. We transform universes into prisons.

Inkwell believes that learning to see properly happens within community, in living dialogue; learning from those that have walked the road before us. Those that have begun translating the transcendent.

So, do you want to live poetically?