Moments of Ecstasy

It is 3 am in the night. Wind is gusting to 40 knots and we have been cradled in big seas for past two weeks. Under a fanfare of shooting stars, the boat is surfing over the dark-blue water like a bullet. I am at the helm. The boat is in my hands, my hands are touching the wind, and my mind is skilfully surfing over the ocean. Ocean is my mind. I am the ocean, the wind and the boat. It is an extraordinary feeling of unity. As Bateson would describe, I am one with "pattern which connects the orchid to the primrose and the dolphin to the whale and all four to me."

Ocean is a tough teacher of life. She teaches fundamentals eloquently with persistence. When I am at the helm but not connected to her, she will do all kinds of to show that I am not connected. She will first flap the sails gently. If it doesn’t work, she will get ferocious. If I am still not with her, she will start swinging the boom. Depending on how detached I am, she may even smash it from one side to the other rather viciously. Am I still missing it? She will start rolling the boat. Am I insisting not to be there? She will splash water on my face first then wet me until I wake up. She wants me awake. She wants me to be fully aware, all senses open, listening to what she is telling me and then responding to her when needed.

I subscribed to a mobile news service last year. Few hours after my subscription, I had already received several news feeds on my mobile phone. I thought about it for a moment. If I receive 10 messages a day, it makes more than 3000 messages in a year. In 70-year, it would take 200,000 messages. I reflected on my experience with ocean and asked what if I am connected to some universal news feed service which continuously sends me messages that I need. What if I miss the fundamental fact that such a subscription exists. Years pass and I live without being aware of millions of unread messages delivered to me. Then I talk about coincidences, luck and sometimes misfortune. Does it all start with the acknowledgement that I am part of larger whole?

My memory takes me back 20 years to my exchange student year in Cincinnati. I am playing the alto saxophone at Wyoming High School Concert Band. We are at the Mid-States Band Championship in Chicago playing a compelling piece, probably “Sailing Beyond the Stars”. I am one with the band and have an unprecedented feeling of melting in music as I was going to melt in the ocean and stars 20 years later. It is a feeling of vanishing in harmony. It is a sublime experience.


I am not in the concert hall any more. I am walking in a mountain forest. I can sense trees whispering to me in the silence of snow. I can feel the curiosity of the weasel looking at me behind the bush. The snow covering the forest blankets my mind. I am feeling the calmness of the forest. I am welcome, feeling home, accepted. I am me.

Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

Mary Oliver


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Finally we are in Kackar Mountains, North-East of Turkey. Markus, our helicopter pilot drops us to the tip of 11,000 ft summit and takes off to fetch the next group. We start to ski down off the edge one by one. We are floating over the meters deep powder snow. I feel an extraordinary feeling of flowing down the slope like a river. Air is whistling past my face, and the snow-shrouded trees are running by. I stopped worrying about what to do next as my body is taking care of it all and I am finely tuned with the slope. The run is so perfect that I just want it to last forever.