What is it you plan to do with your one wild life?
The road seemed to go on forever.
It wound through the back country, through vineyards and farms, past shacks and stretches of open land that kept appearing beyond the edge of the window.
The windows were down. Warm air moved through everything. Through my hair. Through the car. Through the music.
There was always somewhere else ahead. Another town. Another country. Another road. The lyrics were perfect for that time in our lives.
There was something in those words that matched the movement of those years. Something expansive. Something reaching. Music that seemed made for open windows and unfamiliar roads and the strange freedom of not quite knowing what was coming next.
Brave the rise and fall...go on and feel it all, go on and feel it all.
We turned it up. The kids sang from the back. We sang from the front. Sometimes all six of us found the same words at the same time. Sometimes we didn’t.
The road curved through another vineyard. Then a farm. Then a shack.
Every so often, a woman stood alone along the side of the road in a short skirt and heels next to a plastic chair. I knew what that meant. I always would now.
More road. More vines and more sky, on and on, until it was hard to tell one mile from the last. The music kept playing.
These are the days we've been given. What will you do with each of them?
I sang it loudly. Maybe we all did. The wind pulled the words out through the open windows.
There are moments from those two years that I can barely remember now. Entire cities have blurred together. Airbnbs. Flights. Meals. The names of streets I once knew how to navigate. But I remember that road.
I remember the feeling of going somewhere. Not arriving. Going. The hum beneath the tires. The landscape appearing and disappearing through the miles. The kids behind us. The music. The air. And every once in a while, something else passed through, too.
The goats. The family we had lived with. The church. A flash. Then gone. A vineyard outside the window. A voice from the back seat. The next line of the song. Another flash.
Something sad. Something I had loved. Something I had lost. Then the Spanish countryside again.
I didn’t have to stop the car. I didn’t have to follow any of it. The road kept carrying us forward. So did the music.
What will you do with your one wild life...
The road stretched on. Vineyards. Farms. Shacks. Then her, again. Then nothing for miles, just us and the Spanish countryside going by, and the strange, beautiful fact that this was our life.
And for those miles, I didn’t need to know what came next.
The song played again. Or maybe another one did. That part I don’t remember. I remember the feeling. Windows down. Voices filling the car. The road winding and turning ahead of us. The world still enormous. Our stories still healing. Everything moving. Nothing asking to be solved.
There was something healing about it. To let joy stay joy and freedom feel alive even when sadness brushed against it. To look out the window in awe without demanding that everything inside me be settled first.
Years later, I would have Mary Oliver’s words tattooed across my back: What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?