Transcendent

The sky is overcast, and a wall of dark looms larger to the southwest. The storm is coming, and because I am in a river valley, I know that it must be really close for me to see so much of it.

It is not a terrible storm, mind you. Just a basic late spring thunderstorm. Things will get wet. There will be some lightning. It will pass.

But the storm has energy. It has weight. I can feel it, feel it weighing down over some ethereal part of myself. I stand under the canopy of some trees on the inside bend of the river, a place fifty yards or less wide between the watercourse and the barbed wire around the pasture through which it twists. I am fifteen.

As the wind begins to pick up, creating a comforting, hypnotizing white noise above my head, I stare out at an undefined distance in front of me and sharpen my focus not on a place but a time, something cosmic, and in that moment I soak up the weight, soak up the energy of the storm. The things that are invisible become manifest though no more visible and I am one with them. I become aware of my oneness with them.

And the dock rocks slowly with the motion of the sea entering the bay while surface waves break often with a wet, sloshy sound, and a gull calls as it careens on the breeze and I reel my focus back into the visible for a moment.

I am leaning against the railing of the dock, staring across the bay. I can see boats moving against the far shore, and the structures near the water have a transcendent blurriness — the subtle haze of sea-mist, humidity in the air. I am thirty-two, and I and my folks are visiting my sister in League City. The wave motion is so powerful – so elemental – that it is reassuring, tranquilizing, and my eyes again disfocus onto a node of time and space somewhere between the shores.

I glance into my rear view mirror, confirming there is no traffic that I am blocking. The engine is idling in park, and I stuff another newspaper into a bag, adding it to the pile spilling off of the passenger seat. It is a little past 4 a.m. and the city is as asleep as it will ever be. The city is therefore mine, for the moment.

My windows are down, and the night air cools me from the engine heat and my prior exertion from throwing the neighborhood behind me. I am twenty-five, and I’ve taken up this paper route to earn a little extra money as I continue to build my graphic design clientele. Also, I feel like I am participating in an ancient craft, “something every young person should do for a time in their life”, so it is satisfying.

And I am getting these incredibly-toned arms!

But as I stop to prepare for the next neighborhood, I pause to take on even greater meaning. Not only is the paper route transcendent, but its transcendence is framed by the white glow at the window-edge from the streetlight above me. Framed by the breeze that blows, by the crickets, by the stars and the moon which silhouettes the homes I am throwing toward. I am a part of something greater, a small part, an infinitesimal part, but my part makes a difference. I am a link in the chain, a part of the sequence. I am continuity, and after checking that I am safe, I open my mind to that sensation, and drift along that chain, that thread.

And I am cold. I was listening to the sound of the trees creaking, the subtle crinkle of ice, and the soft tinkle of snow crystals as they gust softly across the pack. I am listening to the sound of winter.

There is the far-off rumble of a truck on the highway, and then the sudden deep grumble as a car passes overhead. I am sitting on the thick ice with my knees pulled up under my coat and my hands pulled into the sleeves. I’m inside a 6-foot culvert, which is not quite halfway filled with frozen runoff, passing under the street at the end of my block. “The creek”, as it is known, is my science lab. I am six.

Today my experiments have nothing to do with geology, invertebrate biology, or even audiology (by testing how my echo changes through the culvert depending on where I stand and how loud I yell). No, today we are studying something more private, something inside, something for which I have no word.

I am cold. My cheeks on both ends are numb from the chill. I haven’t moved for awhile. I discovered that the more still I become, the more I go deeper. And I don’t know what that means. I wonder if I am dying, if maybe I am freezing to death. If so, it seems pleasant. But I don’t think I really want to die today. Plus, I would probably get in trouble.

So I tell myself I must rouse, but not just yet. I feel so close to everything around me — the cold, the snow, the ice, the wind, the trees, the rock and dirt above me, the road. I am becoming something else. Or maybe I’m just identifying something else.

I need to figure that out. So I sit still for a little while longer. I let my gaze unfocus, let my ears open to all sound, and concentrate on this strange numbness that comes from without.

And my gaze is broken as one of our groundskeepers walks by. A patron has turned from our sidewalk to step down to their car. They get in. Someone else walks past them on the sidewalk, and the groundskeeper moves through my view again, staring up at the building at something. I was looking out the window beside me, across our yard in the space under the tree near me, to a place somewhere short of the chain-link at the yard of a home across the street.

I am forty, I am at work, and I just traveled through time.