Excerpts From Traveling to the Heartland.

1/3/06 7:24 a.m. Central Time

We are rolling into Hastings, NE, and the sun is just now rising. Hastings seems bigger than I would have imagined, but still familiar, local, and rural. The stop here for the train is brief and on our way out of town we pass a pharmacy and cafe that look like they could have been a still frame from the '70's. It made me smile for some reason like a piece of life frozen in time. We ride past early morning traffic cruising along side of the train, trying to avoid the chill of the frozen dew that is covering everything here in Nebraska this morning.
As the sun rises it reveals fog and haze covering crops and fields that stretch out flat for miles on end. The sky has a grey orange tint to it that makes it look ominous if it wasn’t for the florescent pink and orange clouds scattering the horizon.
If a person could tell how the day would go from sunrises, most days would be heart-breakingly beautiful. They would be days that unfold and envelope with colors that seem new and rare, and will happen only this once just for you, a day that holds nothing but hope and promise. A sky like this one with its brush stroke colors of yellow, pink, orange, and red; trailed across an indescribable blue with wisps of a grey-purple could offer you the world and you would take it without questions or reasons. But unfortunately as the sky slowly fades into the background of dead silhouetted rows of trees, I remember that this is just another day, and I remember where I am headed and why I am on this train.
But maybe we should let the sky foretell our day. After all who would know better how the days is going to go besides the force that brings your days around.



Well the sun rose with so many colors
It nearly broke my heart
And worked me over like a work of art
And I was a part of all that

So go ahead, push your luck
Say what it is you've got to say to me
We will push on into that mystery
And it'll push right back
And there are worse things than that

'Cause for every price
And every penance that I could think of
It's better to have fallen in love
Than never to have fallen at all

'Cause when you live in a world
Well it gets in to who you thought you'd be
And now I laugh at how the world changed me
I think life chose me after all
- Dar Williams, After All