Atlas Sinclair

The audio version of this story is available on the Building A World podcast.

I’ve spent periods of my life lost in wanderlust.  Sometimes I’d leave for two weeks, off on the road somewhere, splitting the hydrocarbon as I traveled in and out of nowhere.  I was entranced by the flowing change of landscape as I drove along.  From desert to forest, coasts to inland valleys.    

For as much as I liked to travel, it wasn’t something I was able to do all the time.  So whenever I wasn’t traveling I was imagining I was.  I am a wonderful day dreamer.  Wondering and Wandering

In this wandering I always felt like I was searching for home, wondering where it is and if I have ever had one.  There is my childhood home of course.  That will always be home.  But have I ever made a home for myself?  I don’t think I ever had and there was this hollowness in me that seemed to reverberate at the thought.  Where would be my home?  Why couldn’t I find it?  Or worse, why couldn’t I recognize it if I had?  

I always try to capture something whenever I’m traveling.  Sometimes it’s a great picture.  Sometimes it’s a feeling…like the excitement of visiting someplace new.  For me to process these feelings and moments, I almost always write about them.  In fact that seems to be the theme of my life.  My experiences don’t feel real to me unless I’ve written them down.  The written structure being akin to framing a picture, putting the memory on display, calling attention to it.  It seems a writerly thing to do, after all.  

I was a very nervous and anxious kid.  I remember being afraid a lot.  There was some twisting tension inside me that made my stomach drop and pang and I struggled with awful stomachaches.  I’d panic about something and it would make my stomach hurt so bad that I’d start to panic about the pain and it grew into this terrible feedback loop of fear.  Panic…anxiety…and fear.    

I recall one particular experience that riddled me with anxiety for the longest time.  I was young, must have been ten years old or so and our family, my mom and dad and my younger brother, were playing Uno at the kitchen table.  It was late in the Arizona summer, a time known to spawn epic monsoon storms, full of lightning and thunder.  

As we were playing, one such storm moved in.  And I remember, all of sudden, this strange ball of light starting to form above the center of the table.  It seemed to be pulling in light from all around it, streaks of this brilliant white light getting sucked into the growing orb.  My ears started to ring and I felt this incredible pressure drop like trying to hear sound underwater.  And then…CRASH!

The light orb burst and this thunderclap exploded, shaking the house and rattling the windows.  It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my life.  It scared me so much!  We thought the house must have been struck by lightning.  We all moved away from the windows, lighting candles because the power had gone out.  

We then waited for the storm to pass…I was in shock and fear-tranced by the flashes of lightning outside causing a strobe effect in our dark and powerless home.  Each flash igniting within me the fear that another hideously loud crash would shake us.   

When the storm was over and it was safe to go outside we went to see if we had indeed been struck by lightning.  There was nothing obvious visible.  The following morning, sunlight revealed that the neighbor’s house across the street had been struck.  Their stucco chimney had a hole blasted out of the side of it.  That had been the target of the strike.  

Afterward, I was traumatized by the event.  Whenever I heard a distant rumble of thunder I began to panic.  I’ve seen dogs do the same, tucking it’s tail and whimpering into a corner.  I didn’t know what was happening to me other than that I was so afraid that my stomach would start to cramp so tightly that I’d cripple over in pain or go running for the toilet, crying and moaning.  

Then it worsened so that anytime I saw a dark cloud, I would panic.  Didn’t even need to hear thunder anymore…I just equated it to any dark cloud in the sky.  I would carry around a brown paper bag and would breathe into it to control my hyperventilation.  I was just this extremely scared little kid, carrying a crumpled brown sack that I breathed into from time to time, inflating it like a bladder…like an external lung.  

This went on for a very long time and nobody knew how to help me.  I was too young to figure it out myself and it was starting to feel pretty helpless.  The monsoons last for three months every summer and it was beginning to seem like I’d forever be incapacitated during that time.  Every afternoon the thunderheads would form and I would cower and sit on the toilet.  Things were getting desperate.   

It was my best friend’s mom who finally found the cure to my storm panic. She gave me a children’s book that explained how thunder happened.  Thunder was caused by lightning.  This I was able to parse but I hadn’t known why.  The lightning is so hot it creates this rapid expansion of air that then contracts as it cools.  This creates a huge sound wave that we hear as thunder.  Up until then I’d thought it was some great growling beast.   

And as for the dark clouds, they were simply regular clouds without the sun on them.  They weren’t evil or sinister.  They were just like any other cloud, except the dark part was a shadow.  

Understanding this took the fear away.  And after awhile, I stopped being so scared and having terrible anxiety and stomachaches.  In fact, I began to look upon storms with reverence.  I began to enjoy them.  I began to miss them when they weren’t around.  I started to look forward to the monsoons every year from then on, able now to truly appreciate how fantastic these kinds of storm systems were.  It was not worth fearing them, rather you should look upon them with respect and honor the chaotic beauty they display.  They were an important part of how the world worked.    

This is a piece I wrote called: The Storm.

The Storm

Here I am, enjoying the storm I’ve been waiting for.  The rain starts, slow at first as if testing the conditions, the way you check the temperature of a baby’s formula, tap a little out onto the soft pale flesh under your wrist, just a little drop here and another here, and maybe one more and then you’re sure it’s right.  The rain starts slow like that, then a little faster, the drops a little bigger, a little heavier.  And then acceleration, a rising of the tempo, the rain finds its gear and hammers on now, steady and sure.  

The sound of it on the roof of my car, where I’m sleeping for the night in some campground deep in the east Texas woods, a place called Magnolia Ridge.  You get there on a hurricane evacuation route and you see these ominous blue and white signs with a great hurricane symbol.  

Is it woodland or swamp?  It looks like a bit of both.  It looks like the place where you shouldn’t turn your back on the water for a legendary alligator may be lurking there, waiting to pounce on its next meal.  A gator that the locals named ‘Old Buck” or “Stumpy” on account of it missing a couple of claws from its hind leg.  A beast that has bested other such beasts for years.  It was the gator king. You keep your eyes on this kind of water.  

But it was dark now and I knew all that was out there but not visible to me.  It was a grand clash of lighting and thunder that woke me out of sleep.  And as the rain thrummed I felt the vibration of it.  I became liquid and the rain fell and on every impact a ripple spread through this liquid.  A prismatic ripple rushing towards the end of this shape, something endless but still having form.  It was my form.  I was in this.  I was a part of this storm.    

And the thunder cracked and another burst of lightning shot across the mangroves.  Briefly placing light on that that waterline you never want to take your eye off of.  

This must be my consciousness, this must be the quantum, the vast ether upon which the vibrations formed and had meaning.  Had purpose.  Here was the factory of a trillion cells at work and fueled by some mystical cosmic force.  

I am alive here, I must be, and by this…this fabric, this gravity, this pattern forming rainbow dust.  But there is fear.  Why is there fear?  Might there be something lurking at the edge of the water, which you see now only in flashes of lightning.  Is it worth your worry?  You’re safely tucked in, dry, doors locked, emergency brake on.  You’re warm.  And this rippling storm energy is just blasting through you.  You are witnessing the vast symphony of the world.  

Ohhh but it’s a lot to take in.  It’s almost too much.  Every sense of you is electric and maybe that lightning is on the hunt for you.  And maybe this charge you’re suddenly feeling is leading it straight to you.  What can you do?  You are in this storm and you are pulled into its wake as it rides along the hinter lands.  

And after awhile it recedes, you hear it galloping further on, its fury in the distance to you now, its song at the edge of an echo.  Calm now.  Great tremendous calm.  What a journey that was and you hadn’t moved an inch.  Hadn’t barely shuffled in your sleeping bag, staid there still hugging your pillow.  

Wow are we magic!  And a song lyric bursts into my mind, a song that goes “If only, if only and la la la.”  And I wondered what it was I wondering if only about.  If only what.  If only a hundred things I wish I’d done better.  If only a hundred decisions had I got right instead of wrong.  If only I was more disciplined.  If only I was more focused.  If only I was more than what I am.  And hadn’t all this just proved it?  What a storm it was and I had burst through to the eye of it and saw there the inner workings, the super string fabric of it, the elemental vibrational force.  What is it you won’t believe?  And why are you working so hard to convince yourself not to believe it?   If only, if only and la…la…la. 

There is a part of me that is deeply curious to explore the realms brought about by the use of psychedelics.  Like Terrence McKenna level exploration.  I’ve thought about it often and fear it.  But this experience here, sober, in my sleeping bag, in my Jeep, in the woods and next to a lake, feeling the true power of nature, makes me leery about the idea.  A thunderstorm can bring me to the existential edge of my form, where on earth would a hero’s dose of psilocybin take me?  And imagine combining the two.  I don’t think I’d return.  Certainly not the same.  And that is the crux.  Because I have more left to do, more I want to accomplish and until I do, I can’t in good conscious cross to that other side.  Not yet.  Someday, but not yet.  Though I’m always curious as to what awaits.  On some level, I think it might be what’s next.  Like that is the future of us, all of us, across that divide.  There’s something to learn there and some of us are going to have to learn it and then somehow bring it back.  But could you ever really come back?     

I can’t rationalize the idea because after crossing into that interior wonder, this magic of consciousness, how could I possibly come back and resume a normal life.  After that kind of journey, I don’t think I could occupy the frame of mind you have to have to operate in the real world and remain functional and competent in an actual job.  How could I continue to send out emails and go to meetings and make phone calls and manage a project and a budget and staff and all those so-called responsible things.  It would be like tasting the most delicious fruit, something that makes your taste buds sing with pleasure, only to resume a diet of bland subsistence.  Dry mouthed, longing for salt. 

I suppose that’s a bit of overthinking on my part.  Because regardless of psychedelic exploration, the next time I’m writing an email at work I’m going to be thinking of this magical midnight thunderstorm ride I’d just been on.  It will now forever be a part of my daydream playlist.  And maybe that’s the point…your mind is yours to explore and it can take you anywhere.  Within that, I’m yet again exploring valleys of fear like the water’s haunting edge or the seeking lightning—this ganglion nerve center in my brain being the only thing capable of producing fear.  All this is, is only what I’ve brought to it.       

As the night settles once again, all the little night creatures come out of hiding from the storm and resume their tasks of chirping and humming and croaking.  I try to calm down so I can get back to sleep, but the storm left me overexcited. 

I saw out of my window now strange streaks of light.  They looked almost like tiny shooting stars streaking across the sky.  I realized they were fireflies.  How beautiful!   

I marvel at it and suddenly feel inspired to write a haiku.  A haiku!?  Good God I’ve never written a haiku in my life.  I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it since first learning about them decades ago in grade school.  Syllables, 5, 7, 5.  

Oh Firefly, a storm

A streaking light of wonder

My eyes sting with tears

I’ve always wanted to see fireflies.  I grew up in the desert, far from their natural habitat.  And here I am.  And here they are.  I want to dream of this.  I have dreamed of this.  Here I am now, in the dreaming.  

Sleep now.  Sleep and dream.