THE BIG ELSEWHERE

It's always some place on the road, the long road of my travels, some small town or country place I'm passing through and perhaps never to pass through again that the nameless epiphany comes: not a vision but a feeling, a flash of the light the soul sees by, triggered by some psychic convergence of who knows what elements of the spirit/mind/body/world interface. It began to happen early on, when as a kid I encountered a place on a road that, for no reason I could see, evoked in me that certainty greater than knowledge. Of course back then I had no idea what do with such awareness, especially right in the face of a strictly non-epiphanic education, and after all the subsequent education I still don't have a clear idea what to do with it; but I know an epiphany when I feel one, it's fully distinct from mere reality, so I've always followed epiphanies, and kept them in mind.

And so I've always been on the road. Epiphany is of course the subliminus to Kerouac's serially epiphanic book of that very title; what better metaphor for this nameless, grail-less quest we're on? Notably, moreover, at least in my life, epiphanies never occurred in classrooms or cities, a fact that tended to reinforce my departure therefrom ASAP, because if an epiphany does anything at all, it INVITES, and so I began to hitch-hike at an early age, out into and around the countryside.

On my road there was that roadside place beside the Mississippi River in Missouri, where I was suddenly filled with the foresense of a wondrous journey ahead if I continued on: that led to the other side of the world, to children who would never have been born if I'd turned back. Then later on the same journey, going over that hill on a one-lane back road in Indiana brought tears to my eyes at seeing that no purpose is needed; and that turn among the mesas in Arizona that taught more than all the universities in the world.

Not every state had epiphanies for me, because borders after all are artifice, whereas epiphanies are hypernatural confluences of who and where and when that require movement on our part to beget that shimmer of past in resonance with future that is the ultimate and eternal present, which anyway is the fundamental business of roads. And thus they lead on, those sirens of the soul.

That small town street corner one night hitching through Virginia, that had in it the heart of all small towns (I've found that heart in so many countries since) and that has meant so much to me across the years: my alter-home town around the world. For of course these wayfare illuminations aren't exclusive to the US, they can be found along roads and other paths of movement anywhere, as I was to learn, though the US nodes perhaps resonate in my native grain. All have become memorial in me, and taught me love of serendipity.

That curving road in Vermont that had all time in it: I'm there yet; and that one up along the northern coast of Maine, that held in its open moment the spirit of everything that grows. It seems these road epiphanies are glimpses of a vaster place than we perceive within the limits of merely wide-open eyes: they are the power points, the tsubos on the meridians of this world and of its moments, and as I pass by them or through them on the meridians of my life, it is as though new vastnesses are revealed in the realm of what I guess you'd call my soul, and I feel spiritually certain of something I've never been able to define, let alone confine, religiously.

Then the road is the road again, and I carry in me the "place" I just passed, and can "go" back there and experience its totality at any moment, no matter where I later am. And it doesn't even have to be a road; a path will do, a path through the woods can be rich with epiphany. What seems to matter in all this, though, is that one is journeying. Not just routine transit from one place to another in the endless loops we tend to make of our lives out to the garage or off to the classroom or office, but commencing a journey beyond simple movement through life; a quest, in other words, of one kind or another, with no particular grail in mind. One thereby embodies the transience to which epiphany comes, as dawn to night. As up on that mountain roadside among the pinons in Colorado where all time was opened to no time...

Of course, you can't make epiphanies happen. More often than not, the epiphanic place is scenically nondescript, there is nothing remarkable or distinct about it; one would never choose such a place over its myriad vicinities as a site of epiphany. Scenic places are more often forgotten for their scenery than remembered for that other power, which is not of world or fashion. Interestingly, all the epiphanic places seem somehow to link to the same source, and cause the same awareness-feeling to shimmer beneath the particular. The place of epiphany is fecund, it is full, it is nurturing, it is joyous. In other words it is more than the mere place it appears to be, much more; it is a windblown veil, a gate to the Big Elsewhere.

Some say my epiphanic places are places I've known in past lives, and that what I'm feeling is the distant echo of ancient memories, sweetened with the savor of immortality. I've had epiphanies here in Japan too, of course, in my wanderings around. So perhaps I was once Japanese. But then I know it is more than past lives, more than life, that this light tells me of. Each time the Big Elsewhere suffuses that particular when and where of me it is a starry surprise. Indeed, if I expect it, or desire it, it never comes; only when I get well out of the way is there room for a spark of eternity in the humdrum; before the epiphany, there is never any expectation that this place, this one-lane road through a swamp in Georgia, or this tiny dirt road past a dilapidated house across a stream in Shiga, or this curve in a waterway in southern Malaysia, will be one of the places I'll never forget as long as I live, and maybe longer. Maybe that's the true power of certain places we pass along the roads we call our lives, on our way to elsewhere.