Flew out of LAX at midnight, fell asleep as we took off, woke up as we were making our approach to land. I’ve never slept that hard on a plane.

As we descended still well before dawn, I watched the lights of the cities and the suburbs flow past, innumerable gold and silver coins lit from within, glowing warm and orange and whiter than white against darkness broken by lighter patches of snow. I was mesmerized by the shapes of the light, and the dark spaces in between, outlined by fiber optic freeways extending to the horizon; staggered by the incredible beauty of light seeping into the shadows, spikes of brilliance refracted by snow surrounded by not snow.

And then the whole scene shifted.

I was no longer looking down upon lights on the ground, I was looking at a vast space hung with glittering spheres, like stars suspended in a substrate of clear gelatin. The hot points of light and their diffused and overlapping luminescence took on a sort of mass, transforming from something familiar into something else.

No longer merely man-made sigils that delineate the borders of civilization, the network of streetlights and stoplights and headlights acquired a raw physicality, bursting to life like the phosphorescent nuclei of energetic cells surrounded by illuminated protoplasm, all connected into some radiant otherwordly organism that extended itself in three dimensions, hovering above the ground and reaching up to the sky and out into space in all directions. It was alive.

At the precise moment this crystallized, I felt a feeling I have never felt before. That I was seeing for the first time, like a baby out of the womb. I suddenly unsaw. And then I SAW. At this moment of revelation, the feeling was so overwhelming I began to cry, a deep sob from somewhere lost long ago. For that brief, magnificent instant, I felt I had never seen anything so beautiful.

We touched ground, and I stepped off the jetway into the airport and as I walked I could hear every sound, even the ambient noise we learn to ignore, as if it were a separate note played in some gorgeous symphony. I heard the whole and the parts simultaneously…the murmur of a thousand conversations sounded like water flowing over rocks, strains of voices rising and falling, mixing and separating into syllables, so fresh to my ear that I was transfixed. Each individual soundwave was clear and distinct and at the same time merging and blending to create the most fascinating music I had ever experienced.

To say this was a profound experience is a severe understatement.

This is going to be a very good year.

• awakening
• expanded perception
• imagination