Finally, I’m off the grid of humanity, off into a place where I can just drift and drive. After four hours, I’m out past the cell zone, out past the radio. My mind and my quixotic soul are now in complete congruence. And on into the silent sheets of rain I spin. Into God’s great sky of grey, folding into each breath of wind. I slow, feeling the pull of an easy magnetism and ease the car to the right. Before me, hundreds of ravens take to the air circling my car. They too are the blood and bone of me, and I am breathless as they share their spirit wood with me. The black sky, their painting of feathers above me, the way their wings brush against the sightless horizon enter me as myth. The birds feel as if they’ve soldiered through time to be here, and that this is their final immaculate place of rest. Four hours and hundreds of miles of exits, and this is the random one I chose. I will not spread my camera here upon your silent landscape of rain. Instead I will touch your black earth, the roots of the trees from which you were born. I chose not to photograph you; I chose instead to commit you to my inner world. Not everything needs to be rendered still. In these recent years, I’ve chosen to walk away from more and more images. I am happy in the fact that I alone have seen them. The cumbersome nature of the camera takes away from the sense of being true and pure as witness in spirit.