A particular and very strange feeling came on me while running on an unsignposted track I had chanced upon, having just reached the crest of a grassy hill where sudden delightful views opened up on every quarter. The feeling’s causes you could try to determine.
First there was the sighting just before, of the open range farm and bushland receding to the violet distance, so that my lingering fears about trespassing on this property and the possibility of an armed farmer for instance, were dismissed, and I was clearly quite alone under the sun, and would be able to continue my delighted exploration on the twisting strand of dirt ahead that drifted through the undulating hills.
Second, might be the mauve tone that hovered down lower when my dreaming eyes paused, it was a tone I could just barely discern – was it really there that flossy mauve or was it not? The leaves also on a remnant forest tree that stood alone in the wind, were oddly not moving on the gusts I could feel rummaging quite strongly at my shirt. Why were the leaves not moving on the stunted tree?
This sort of gentle aesthetic figuring that I so loved, I indulged then with nothing to fear since I was so clearly alone. But I was not. With a sudden shock I became aware that there was company. Someone had arrived during those moments when I was distracted looking at the grass and trees, and now they were already present with me, leaving no chance for me to deny or reject them.
But I was not scared. I spun across the points of the compass on the pyramid hill in disbelief that I could not see the intruder. The company was indulgent and nurturing. It was as if a parent had been watching their loved child and just stepped out from a hiding place, and smiled in love as the child looked and realized they had been under observation for some time. This was someone who knew all about me, and knew the reason I was running across that hill on the farmer’s land better than I ever would myself. This was the only mystic experience of my life. It was after the style of Moses or Rimbaud perhaps.
Significantly, there was a family called Christian who had pioneered the area. Most now were resting in the cemetery on the pine top hill. Harry Christian in his football guernsey with dark athletic build and unabashed grin cradled the football as captain in the sepia tones of the nineteen twenty four team portrait. That day when I reached home I scrambled for the street directory to find the light brown line of my track where it petered off the page away from the train terminus of the town we had just moved to. When I turned the page I found it did indeed have a name. It was called Christian Road.
The subconscious has precis skills to encapsulate in an image what would take days to calculate and verify rationally on pen and page. When I saw the name of that road, I felt the hills that flexed and rolled slightly underfoot as though I was standing on the back of a living body. By contrast my conscious mind stepped by habit carefully ahead seeking to hammer in an intellectual stake that could be trusted.
I immediately began to calculate in the map’s index using finger and thumb to count out blocks of names. There was only one Christian Rd out of sixty thousand entries. There was no Islam Way or Buddhist Path. My once in a lifetime mystical experience, or once in a million lifetimes for all I knew, occurred on an unnamed road that had a one in sixty thousand chance of being named after an iconic religious cliche. How could I not accept this as significant? Rational success at drawing conclusions so often was about noticing a connection between separate events. Turn on a certain switch after which the pump starts up.
There were ways ahead to weigh and test this first reaction, and a future lifetime to add the grist of future observations. It seemed on that day that everywhere were arrangements in what seemed like chaos. My plodding and barely capable mind had work to do while trying to figure this out, the skeptic in me still intact though shaking.