Once in a Lifetime

Loren Eiseley was a scientist and a naturalist, but he had a mystic's eye.

Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort. The mind has sunk away into its beginning among old roots and the obscure tricklings and movings that stir inanimate things. Like the charmed fairy circle into which a man once stepped, and upon emergence learned that the whole century had passed in a single night, one can never quite define the secret; but it has something to do, I am sure, with common water.

- Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey