About 16 years ago, I went camping with a buddy of mine.
We were camping just alongside a little body of fresh water called Lake Nacimiento, about halfway up the California coastal range. It’s a wooded area, where feral Turkey can be spotted foraging amongst undergrowth. Not exactly unpopulated, but devoid of major Industry & Commerce. It gets dark at night.
I’m a city boy, always have been; I knew my planes better than my trees in those days. Within 24 hours I’d twisted my ankle on some unstable scree and had to be carted into town to get a boot and some crutches. I spent the rest of the week hobbling around to different reading spots, enjoying the diversity of wildlife that reveals itself to a man who sits still, quietly reading, for lengths of time. Enchanting place.
At night, my buddy and I would move away from the campsite a bit, away from the fires and people, and look at the stars. I remember lying on my back and sinking my fingers into the soft, giving earth beneath, holding on for dear life.
A few years earlier, I’d had my first experience with deep-water SCUBA, and I will always remember that feeling of existing in the space above a tremendous Void that you cannot see the bottom of: the scared monkey in the back of my head screaming that we were going to Fall, we were going to DIE. I am told the formal name for this is Vertigo.
In both of those spaces, I had to calm the scared monkey before I could enjoy myself. It’s ok, we’re safe, we’re not going to Fall. Eventually, after a lot of deep, level breathing, the heart slows and the blood cools. In both of those spaces, things began to reveal themselves to me.
There were the 3 stars that even I could see growing up, of course, but now there were so many more. In-between every pair of stars were dark patches, but when the eye focused for a bit there and relaxed, more stars always revealed themselves. Even the longest of photographic exposures cannot convey the swimming, kaleidoscopic nature of placing your perception first here and then there, and finding that no matter where you look, there is more to see.
I thought at first that the Milky Way was a bit of terrestrial cloud which was catching some stray light, but no, as I stared, the granularity and texture deepened, splitting fractally, as they do when DMT analogues modify one’s perception.
It was an experience that changed me, certainly.
It became clear then, as it had when I’d hung suspended in the water amongst the great kelp fronds, that I’d lived my entire life inside a kind of Walled Garden; that I had been sheltered and protected from anything which might threaten me, yes, but also from everything which was capable of reaching inside me and gifting me with that feeling that the ancients called The Sublime: the profound momentary perception of the reality that you are a very small part of something truly tremendous.
I would gradually come to an understanding that all Human Grandness was an echo of some hidden natural splendor; that the great cathedrals and towering skyscrapers were great forests and cliff faces, chopped up and reorganized into pleasing shapes for our patronizing protection. That before we could truly fall in love with the flickering lights of the Screen, we would first have to look away from the glittering vault of the Heavens. That everything has a Price, and even if Darkness & Night had always been gods that brought death and despair, that perhaps we should not have vanquished them so readily.
I learned that we had paid a very steep price
