A Short Journey to the Unknown

Authors who write about nature often seem to experience dramatic visions--epiphanies, we might better call them--in which the individual is revealed as a vital element in nature's grand design for the planet Earth. Annie Dillard, for example, has seen a cedar tree in her backyard burning with lights, "each cell buzzing with flame." Rick Bass sits on a rocky hilltop overlooking lush green fields of mint and "feel[s] my soul cutting down into the bedrock." So strong is this feeling, in fact, that he comes to believe he is as one with the rock. "I, too, am becoming the earth," Bass declares. The Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan finds a large colony of flamingos wading in a Yucatan lagoon and describes the sight as "a vision so incredible and thick and numinous [that] I know it will open inside my eyes in the moment before death when a lived life draws itself out one last time before closing forever and we are drawn to these birds the way fire pulls air into it."

Those who have had similar epiphanies usually feel tempted to write about them, often at great length. I have not. Quite simply, it is because I have yet to experience the state of transport that gives birth to such moments of ecstatic vision. Perhaps this will always be the case, since my moments of deepest reflection and inner calm are habitually interrupted by such commonplace thoughts as whether or not I left the dog locked outside in the backyard or paid the overdue gas bill. But I have experienced one moment, one brief and precious moment, when I came very close to a transcendental vision, brought on by an uncommonly barren but dramatic landscape. It is perhaps worth the telling, especially for those readers who, like myself, await their first epiphany from the world of nature. So, too, is the journey to the place where it occurred, which, as the expression has it, was well off the beaten path.

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