Into the Jungle

I received a text this afternoon — friend of a friend of a friend — saying yes she'd be delighted to give me a massage and gave me directions to her house which was at the end of twisting roads where palms brushed down to the sides of the car and bougainvillea snaked up and over embankments in shouting bursts of pink and orange — up and up from the beach, closer all the time to Haleakala (the crater) but not quite that far, down into a deeply shadowed gully and up the other side, guava trees, mango groves....

With my eyes closed on the massage table, the bird calls were piercing and omnipresent, not a single one I could identify, but foreign and tropical. I imagined their plumage and exotic colors, like dream-birds that exist in the rare dream and are always just out of reach, fluttering beyond the branches of a tree too high, barely glimpsed for all the bright feathers —

And in that deep-tissue haze (discovering muscles I didn't know existed but very clearly were calling out to be named), the music of a single flute, a quietly resonant drumming — I thought this is what it feels like to move on to another state of consciousness. One could name that state death, or rebirth, or merely a transcendence to something, someplace other — honestly, I don't know what to call it. All I know is that I entered a place of utter peace and contentment, with the outcome being:

this is enough.