Ecstatic Vision #1
Check out Ecstatic Vision #2.
This first event happened in December of 2003.
It was around the holidays, and I was visiting friends and family on Long Island. I was living in New Rochelle at the time, so I had a car and wasn’t unfamiliar with driving around. I mention this because an occasional current source of pleasure for me — a city mouse — is visiting my old home and being able to drive around very fast and very late at night, screaming along to a CD and generally letting it all out.
Then as now, I enjoyed this pastime.
I had left a friend’s house at around 2:30 in the morning. It was basically around the corner from me, so it would have taken me two minutes to drive straight home. But as I was waiting in the left turn lane at the large intersection, I heard Led Zeppelin’s “Hey Hey What Can I Do” on the radio and I was compelled to take a little spin and go straight instead. So I did.
The road I stayed on was called Vanderbilt Parkway. It’s a very long and very hilly road, and there are few if any streetlights. If you go fast at all, the changes in elevation make it feel a little bit like a roller coaster — I used to be driven along this road to get a haircut, so I enjoyed it as a kid, and it was nostalgic whenever I went back.
I turned off the radio a little ways down the curvy road, but still continued singing, gloriously a cappella and probably badly. I was heavy into Incubus at the time, so I started singing a song called “Make Yourself;” it’s a pun and it’s about self-encouragement but also existentialism. Hooray–
Made a left onto Commack Road. No one but Dix Hillians (if they) cares about this detail.
Still in my Incubus mode, I started singing “Drive.” I think I did so because 1) I’d been singing Incubus minutes before and 2) I was driving at the time.
Anyway, I thought to myself, “K-Rock [New York radio station] plays this song sometimes.”
I continued singing as I flipped on the radio–
and the radio started singing along with ME.
“Drive,” right before the chorus picked up.
Not just the same group or song, but the same moment–
I stopped at the next light, turned off the car, left the headlights on, and curled up in fetal position right in the middle of the street.*
*this didn’t actually happen.
I did turn ghost-white though. I covered my mouth, jaw dropped, and then I looked in the rear-view mirror to see if anyone or anything was in the back seat, or on my shoulder, or looking at or over me.
I sat in silence til the song was over. Then I flipped off the radio, drove calmly home and wrote down in even more detail what had just happened.
Ostensibly to share with you on my blog, a year and a half later.
Call it what you want, call it divine intervention, call it synchronicity.
Just know that it happened. And for all the times that this DOESN’T happen, understand that once in a long while, it does. Inner and outer, the self and the world, collide and fulfill each other, their oneness is manifested, the illusion of their separateness….
Have a good day.
No Comments »