What Was It?

When I started to walk I had the idea that there was something out there that I could experience, and so bring into myself, that would beautify that which I am. Wanting to "be" wilderness, I walked into it.

Often, I looked down at my feet for long periods, long miles. I saw scenes there which could have easily had a larger scale. Are these little lichens beside the trail, in a sere landscape of shifting sand patterns, peppered by black volcanic soil and mud-colored pools? Or are they trees seen from a drone crossing a vast tundra? Small and large exchanged themselves often.

And then I became so comfortable with these unrolled spools of scaled landscape, that they seemed to be interior scenes. Archipelagos of stomach acid, or endless miles of blood-vessel delta. Forests of hair follicles in a gentle wind...

There was no difference between me and what I beheld. This knowledge was never alarming...it was always "just so." I walked and held this sense of oneness with mild interest.

Eventually it extended to the other faces that came before me. I saw their greasy hair, and knew it as my own. They spoke to me in words, and I felt my own need prompting me to speak. I was hungry, and my companion spoke about food. It mattered not that they spoke and not I, for we shared a ground of being from which many mouths may speak -- it matters not which one.

I became a balancing act of competing injured parts. A sunburn or rash: seen on another hiker, but felt keenly. Sore muscles, re-membered into being by bare legs before me, or behind me, or, with surprise, my own seen again from odd angle as I tied a shoe.

We don't really "go anywhere." Our futures rush up around us, called in a thousand ways long before. To walk is to live out a desire that one may be bathed in an ever-changing caress of the earth. I believed that if I moved my legs in a certain way, the land would flow around me.

We get what we truly believe to be so, and so this happened.

I was made love to by the earth. And I responded as a lover should. Until finally I could take in no more. I appreciated less the grasses of each subsequent day. I became an inattentive lover. I needed to stop "moving." I need to hold a scene again long enough to notice everything about it. Otherwise I become the finicky child, eating only the sweets on the plate, and leaving the rest. I knew I should leave, rather than sin in this way!

And so I find myself in rooms. The same rooms from which I attached tendrils of consciousness to faraway deserts, but within which now I can see the oneness which is the gift of the trail to me. I visit my sister, and her eyes and thoughts are my own. In fact there is a single thought we hold across two minds: my piece of it is defined by the shape of her piece. And it is "just so" that the piece she holds is unified with my own. There is pleasure in holding different pieces. I no longer understand my prior urgent need to create the same piece of thought in every mind around me.

This is what I have learned.