First of all, I’ve been presented with an experience altogether new — one that engages certain energies in me and rejects others. Or maybe that has the potential to embrace it all, everything. That’s all I’m going to call it: The experience. Disparate energies collide and converge at the seams. There are areas of overlap that include layers of meaning. It’s like the desert and the ocean, how each has its equal yet distinct draw. The desert gives me the intensity of heat, the coherent texture of dry, the dimensional mountains, the substantial blue of the uninterrupted sky. The ocean is vast and turbulent. A depth and expanse that pulls — with its own gravity — things into it and consumes them, makes them wet. A serious cleansing. And there is the in-between. The six hours of driving. The barren landscape and the curves of the earth.
The experience I had left me turbulent. I was afraid. And it was a rush, a thrill. Animal and intoxicating. A moment of terrifying beauty. Things coursed through my veins never before passively or actively allowed to form. I had to open my mouth to breathe. At once agitating and soothing. Nothing has ever been so openly uninvited and yet so persistent in me. My utter surprise at my actions. The shock of my recurring spontaneous divergence.
I was standing at my kitchen sink yesterday morning, washing my dishes. I was running hot water into a glass and letting it overflow. The effect was hypnotic, lasting for several seconds before my hand reached out involuntarily, closing the tap. I hadn’t gotten much sleep and so was under the influence of that low, heavy feeling of being half-conscious when I woke up to something new. I must have felt freed by it. I must have been glad. Secretly grateful. Because when I lifted my head and looked out the window, I saw a tent of web spun in a corner, forks of it pitched and anchored to grab the wall on either side. It produced a long sigh. I heard my own voice say, “there are many things.”
Several minutes later I was in my car driving west to the ocean, moving smoothly and readily away from the desert, feeling that new place inside me like a sun, everything else flowing around its axis, moving in circles in a series of unsteady sways. When I arrived at the ocean, I instantly obeyed its pulling authority and went out for a run along the beach.
I ran from Santa Monica pier to Venice beach and beyond, allowing my steady cadence to halt all activity inside, providing a lull from which to take inventory of new surroundings. A parade of people strung along my path kept my attention between long gazes across the surface of the water. The diversity of shape and color, feature and form, clothing and skin — a busy beach as a forum for the inclusion of everything, the exclusion of exactly nothing. And perhaps not everything fits. Some men should not remove their shirts. Spandex is not for everyone. There is no way of knowing these things until they present themselves.
How else to discover what’s useful and important to my process — to spiritual evolution — than to travel and explore. To look at everything from a distance and each thing up close, watching for features, indications that it also includes everything. Carried along on legs that have known many miles and grow longer still. Sifting experience into knowing. Weighing everything against this I know, this I want, this I have never known. Torturing the ground beneath my feet with every step, every thrust forward. For this I have entire oceans of clear, choppy appetite.
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