Arrival

When I arrived at my final destination in Los Angeles my cell phone died. The cord would no longer attach and after taking a few last battery breaths, she stopped accepting life. She had burned brightly, the Painter. She was better known for making calls and for taking calls, she had no name but her images remain. Forever, for everyone, from sea to shining sea...

The sun sets over palm trees and the Pacific in Long Beach, California after the first day of my internship and the last post of this story. When I was young and living in cold and snowy Vermont, it was hard for me to believe that the California beaches I saw on TV were real. I couldn't perceive it. But even though those beaches were beyond the boundaries of my experience, they had simply been there all along. For so long I thought imagination meant making up something that is not real. Through this road trip and this blog, I've discovered that imagination means tuning into something so it can become real. 

To imagine is to move an image.

The mind has no size or shape, just awareness. Enlightenment occurs when there are no longer any obstacles to our awareness or spiritual vision. Awareness does not penetrate or expand, it simply opens to what has always been present.   -His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama