. . . . Traffic was easing now as the road ran along Sri Lanka’s southwest shore. Then an amazing thing occurred. That whole eighteen-mile stretch from Induruwa to Hikkaduwa turned into a kind of satori experience. I began to feet the motion of the motorcycle not as change, but as pure unbroken continuity. I was trying to reach for a still point within the movement itself, when all at once, without any transition, I was in it. I was suddenly not moving. I could feel the vibration of the motor under my seat and the wind on my face, but I was not moving. I sat there, suspended in the stillness at the center of all phenomena, where there’s nowhere else to go. I seemed, incredibly, not even to be driving the bike. It was like the penny arcade game where you steer a car down a road that is coming at you on the screen while you yourself don’t move. Yet it was not exactly like that, because I wasn’t the one driving the bike, certainly not the only one. The road was driving it, and so were the people and buses and carts, and the crazily leaning palms.
Consciousness was everywhere, no longer contained in my skull, no longer divided up into separate heads and walled in behind separate pairs of eyes. The air was thick with it, mythically dense and spongy, all colors very vivid. The world was coming toward me and greeting me - a steady thrum of greeting, with me not moving and all my senses freshly open to each face as it approached me and moved by me. Each angle of house and tilt of gutter was so perfect, so couldn’t-be-otherwise. Everything was orchestrated to permit us, each and all, to reach this moment with perfect timing and precision - the guy walking out of the privy, all the eatings and shittings that enabled him to arrive just so on the scene, exactly on cue. “Oh, here you are again!” I thought - you bank of purple flowers by the white wall in the wash of afternoon light - “I’ve been seeing you always, I’ve been waiting for you always.”
It was that sense of homecoming, in the golden glow on the faces along the western sea, that made me begin to cry. There I was, going down Galle Road, through the erratic traffic of a Wednesday afternoon in December, with tears trickling down behind my sunglasses. As the consciousness-broken-loose swerved my bike neatly between buses and carts and an occasional tourist limousine, the thought arose that with this experience of time, you need no haven or final rest to strive for. You make your home in the very midst of change. . . .
Widening Circles. New Society.
© Joanna Macy