High in the Andes Excerpt #1: PART 1: INTRODUCTION Prologue: The Fantastic Journey Looking back, I'd say it was the rhythm that started it all. And now, as then, I can still hear that train vibrating along what seemed an eternal track, clicking systematically where one rail followed another. As I stared out the window, eventually I forgot my destination, and became lost in a place of shifting landscapes and horizons. Soon I found myself on a different journey, one that I felt I had taken before. I couldn't remember when, or any particular details, but I knew it just the same, in a way that just didn't have to be questioned. But where was I going? I must have known, because it wasn't my habit to travel without a destination. Yet the more I pondered that question, the more it eluded me. I finally let it go (as though the very effort to remember had the opposite effect) and discovered that the act of letting go allowed me to remember; allowed the memory to come a different way. The memory was not a thought, but a knowing; just knowing. Only now as I look back and analyze, I can say that knowing is a pure state where those building blocks of intellect, like doubt, inquiry, categorization, and assessment, find no interplay. Knowing-an ineffable state of being-devoid of those building blocks, yet blissful, peaceful, all encompassing. And yet, I later reflected, where is the journey in just the being? My answer was not a resolution, but simply the reflection that one was a state of inquiry, the other of knowing... "May I join you?," he asked. How long it took me to shift realities, I'll never know, because where I had just been, the dimension of time didn't exist. Yet in the glance that brought my gaze directly into his eyes in that single movement came the realization that I had known him in some distant and ancient past. Somehow we were beyond, yet prior to, introductions, and our current names now little mattered. We focused together for a moment out the window on the clouds, which seemed to enshroud us within another dimension of knowing. The pulsing on the tracks became the beating heart that sustained a body of shared memories; a shared love so deep that our souls vibrated as one. Our gazes came back together, and as they met, our hearts embraced, and held ever more strongly as we wondered how long it had been since we were last together, and realized how much we had missed each other. What the relationship might now become was a thought that would only manifest in a different time frame. For the moment, we dwelt in a timeless rapture, and floated past boundaries into a place of engulfing joy. Our souls were as two clouds becoming one and spreading infinitely in all directions. As the reverie gave way to our more immediate surroundings, my new friend (old self?) extended his hand. "Winston's the name," he said, "but don't worry, I'm not a smoker," an assurance he appended knowing the section we were seated in. "I get off at the first stop." Only later would I fathom the meaning of that cryptic statement. For the moment, my mind was still engaged in pursuing the origins of our relationship. Responding to my silence, Winston followed up his introduction with an intriguing tale of his recent trip; a spellbinding account that inured me to its length.