32. The Trembling Pyramid
You run down in big leaps, chunks of cooled lava careening from your wake.
Rocks of all sizes overtake you and rush past, energized by the molten heat sizzling from underfoot.
[ Cut sideways to zip around a steam vent ] —
Now you’re sprinting perpendicular to the slope. A wide halo of ash surrounds the high volcano crater, where you started. But the ash falls upward — suspended and drifting slowly, as though inside a snowglobe.
The mountain rumbles different pitches all at once. Whooping cries sound above the din: a chaos of ocean birds in the air, slick blue-green feathers reflecting shards of sun through muted sky.
You suspect the pyramid of trying to set a tempo.
A figure in the distance appears, approaching fast, running straight at you.
// Side B //
Thanks for tuning in! The track you heard is an oldie ~ bits of studio improv from 2016, St. Patricks Day, titled “off to the races”.
It’s been months of accelerating change, we just whooshed past the 3-year anniversary of Campfire Sparks, and there’s 0 sign of let-up.
Thank you for your readership + listenership + fantasticnessship 🍀 I’ve got a story for you today and it’s 100% true.
A wild experience I’ve never had before
Two months ago in Berlin, I portaled into another dimension.
It’s just past midnight, and I’m sitting at my desk at home, lamps dimmed.
I press play on a recorded meditation that I’d tried for the first time a few days before. A voice guides me through ten minutes of breath-holds coordinated with squeezing the body’s lower muscle groups, with the intention of accelerating the spinal fluid’s natural upward flow — into the brain.
5 or 10 minutes after doing the breathing exercises, I feel a sunburst of energy lighting up my mind. The voice has moved on to other ideas, but I am now traveling at high speed through a tunnel of blues and purples. It is visual and visceral and I am shocked.
Instinct tells me to stay on top of the wave, for it to continue.
Over the next — what feels like two hours, but is only thirty minutes — I surf a boundary space, between deep emotions of universal love and the obstacles that block me from its immensity . . . versus a background awareness of sitting by myself somewhere in the physical world. I’m laughing, crying from joy and sadness alternating or combined, tears streaming out from closed eyes.
I let motor functions slacken, so I’m freely drooling too — just making a righteous mess — but the intensity of the emotional roller-coaster pulls me fully through. I awaken to my love for family and friends and even random acquaintances around me, and for myself, the last of which hits me like a bomb.
At one point a glow of light suffuses my field of vision, then brightly envelopes the whole thing, which I can’t explain because it’s the middle of the night and I’m alone.
Afterwards . . .
I return, from somewhere — and it ends up taking a few hours to come down.
First I walk to the bathroom to clean up. When I catch myself in the mirror, I’m stunned. I see the most beautiful smile on my own face, one I’ve never witnessed.
Then I sit at the piano and, still riding the intensity of the journey, begin to play from a space completely untouched by assessment. That experience, also, is unlike anything I’ve ever felt.
A funny thing happens the next morning.
I go across town to record a solo-piano session. The producer picks me up at the train station, and on the car ride to the studio he tells me about the latest ayahuasca retreat he went to — usually he attends two ceremonies per year. During his stories the hairs on the back of my neck start tingling, because I realize that I just went to a similar place, only without substances.
A psychedelic trip, with no psychedelics.
There was also a curious detail on the night of, at journey’s end.
Longtime readers might have picked up on my obsession with recording. It started with piano workshop time, then expanded to writing, and photography to some extent. Most recently I’ve been walking for an hour each morning, dictating into voice memos, could be brain dumps or problem-solving or some “dear diary” mode.
I enjoy the routine of feeling ushered by motion, and brisk air, into the studio, where I jot on paper whatever was revealed or discovered while outside, over a cup of fresh coffee.
When I disembarked from the meditation, I felt so full of awe and wonder that I felt an impulse to record my voice — so I did. I spoke all my thoughts and described what just happened and how life couldn’t ever be the same again, now that I knew, with my entire body, the truth.
What eternity feels like.
I started the voice memos app while talking, while stepping into the bathroom and greeting new-me reflected in the mirror. Then, since seeing my doppelgänger was two new flabbergasts, at least, I fetched my Nikon to record video, too.
Later on, when finally feeling tranquil enough again, right before heading to bed, I fetched the camera to watch the video.
There was no video.
Strange. I opened my phone to look for the voice memo.
There was no voice recording, either.