Mysticism: The Newly-Scraped Road, and the Soul's Night, John of the Cross and James Finley.

Quite innervated and driven by caffeine to a certain richness in the darkness of the soul's night, smelling my own a** and such, so it isn't quite sensory deprivation--mayhap yet happiness deprivation or a rather soulish sense of self-punishment, hitting myself with oak branches and other things.

I was watching the blankness in the road pattern, driving slowly "D1" behind the grader, watching him put up the blade, the county man, then set it back down, and he stopped for me, waved a hand, and went along ahead, no longer tracing his pattern but laying down a fresh set: P235 front, P265 rear, a haphazard little skidmark that was my own calling card, my own little flash of Zorro.

"Laying down tracks" as it were, "Ice Cube" of the hinterlands, or something, where even the National Guard is fearful to tread--an old man, grazing along in life, I might be, with a certain variety of indeterminence about the spirit floating along, somewhere between brain and solar plexus, feeling wise, perhaps just an anomaly of the caffeine.

James Finley had commented on brotherhood, a certain bolstering of the spirit by being flanked by kindred spirits, but a thought of lynch mobs and other such, Custer's fighting force riding unawares, proudly, to their certain demise.  But then Finely elucidated on his thought, that the kindred spirit was God, and God was there all along, even in the dark night of the soul where we don't sense him.

Such was and is the function of faith, "the evidence of things not seen."

Such also, John of the Cross going through the energetic partial depression of the Dark Night of the Soul, that not-sensing, that stewing, that basting in the silence of God, and finally, after the surrender to the Creator, we are in perfect brotherhood with such.

The little dirt road was of course, the blank page of life, and I laid my prints upon it: God willing, these be good, and not ill, and as such, onward to bigger and better as they say, forming precedents and marking tendencies and so forth that labor on in memory, and that perfect alignment with God somewhere ahead, as the man said of the Cloud of Unknowing.