One day I walked out my front door.  Then I walked out of the world as I knew it.  A few steps past the hedge,  suddenly I wasn't there in the same way  I was before, instead I was everywhere: my ribs weren't a cage, my skin wasn't a soon to be shroud.  The crabapple tree in the yard wasn't there, either, but it was.  It...shimmered.  I was part of everything.  There was no division, there was only oneness. No description is adequate, but if I were a quantum physicist I might say I was dancing a minuet with the energy between neutrinos - in a Euclidean wormhole.  It was that delicate and that immense. 

I wasn't on drugs and hadn't been drinking.  I'm mildly paranoid in a way I would describe as skeptical, but I've never hallucinated.  I'm not suggestible, either.  I probably got that from my father.  Once he told me he'd known a guy who could hypnotize people.  My father watched him do it and cried "I'm next! Hypnotize ME!", but the mesmerist told him "I can't, you won't let me."  "But I'm asking you to do it!"  "I know.  But you won't let me."  Telling the story, my father sounded still disappointed and somewhat sad.  It's not easy being someone who won't be taken in, taken along.  It can't be easy being the one who describes the sartorial deficiencies in the Emperor's birthday suit, the one with x-ray eyes who can only dream with his eyes open, whose only magic lies in lazy Sunday mornings and whose miracles come with warnings.  But he loved that quote, the one that goes "For those with faith, no explanation is necessary. For those without, no explanation is possible."   My father went out one day and returned - eyes shining- with a kiwi fruit.  We'd never seen one before. We all gathered around him, marveling at the furry brown skin and brilliant green martian flesh, the galaxy of black seeds: he gave us all a taste.

It was late morning, the sun was shining. Nothing before that moment heralded the coming ecstasy.  There was no image in my toast, no soul-whispering harbinger that I was ripe for transcendence: it happened and was over in an eternal, universe unveiling, breath of divine grace moment. I don't talk about it.  People might want to know your astrological sign but they don't often want to know this: many of the stars we see twinkling in the night sky are already dead and gone in a white-hot blaze of oblivion. The message hasn't reached us yet; it's still light-years away.  The birth of a galaxy of stars won't be visible until we're gone; but it's happening now, in this moment.