A fantastic day's driving today. Berkeley was fun (and useful) but it was time to move on. After getting supplies for the next few days I headed off north on the next stage of the trip - to Fort Bragg. The drive along the coast more than made up for missing the Big Sur coast (due to forest fires) - it is a stunning drive which only gives one the problem of keeping the car on the road while gawking at the views that lie around almost every bend. I managed to keep it all together, and arrived in Fort Bragg in the early evening. The azure Pacific is a haunting prescence here, especially when there is fog or haze on the shore, and you only glimpse the endless ocean that you know continues into the infinite horizon.
I began to see that some of my feeling down here has always been with me when I have travelled: it is a sense of being alone in the big wide world combined with the shallowness of experience that comes with moving rapidly from place to place. I feel that the world is such a wonderful thing to experience, that each town, valley and mountain has a lifetime of experience to offer a person, and that I can only skim the bare surface of the things I am seeing as I journey onward. Travelling brings forward the absolute truth that we see so little here, that our experiences are so tiny a part of the world we live in. I know that I am here with a definite purpose, but oh! how I long to explore everywhere - every facet, every crevice from the lowest valley to the highest mountain top. How I long to investigate, to leap from the hilltops, to make myself immune from busyness, from schedules and darting about. I wish to look long and see into the truth of things, to find their essence.
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