I vanished while exploring a remote Florida swamp a few days ago—or was it a few minutes ago?

It seemed to swallow my reality and identity as I plunged deeper and deeper into her boggy moistness. And this was no bad thing.

As the shadows grew longer and the trail fainter, I realized there was no hope of finding my way out, having been hiking since sunrise. With no overnight gear, my pulse quickened and my adrenaline raced. As any well-worn and seasoned hiker knows, when in doubt, sit down. I deposited my weary body on the ground which was covered with furry verdant moss. It was very soft. I then took some time to calm my senses, but the tangled cypress branches began to darken and show themselves in a more mysterious light.

I recalled the words of Thoreau, the patron saint of the swamp, “Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp.” Why? Because “I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps…and the swamps are the wildest and richest gardens that we have. Such a depth of verdure into which you sink.”

Those words seemed to calm me, and I wearily lay back in the mossy and peaty softness, the past months weighing heavy, pressing me prostrate. I felt the edges of my body gently sink a bit into the cool soft moistness of the bog, pliant and trembling, as if I were slipping into the very womb of the swamp. A sacred transcendence seemed to engulf me.

As I gazed upward, sparkling diamond constellations appeared through the tangled cypress limbs and webs of spanish moss, as the long day slowly faded from view. The swamp slowly came alive with the steady hum of gnats and mosquitos amidst a cacophony of frog ribbets, gator croaks above which was the plaintive hooting of a distant owl. As the sounds crowded in, my senses heightened and I closed my eyes hoping to take away the wildness. The noise of the swamp seemed to drown out the song of shame from the choir of my past. I began to internalize the sounds. As anyone who enjoys music knows, while touch, smell and taste penetrate the interior of one’s being, hearing is a more powerful experience. I recalled my daughter  covering her ears in scary movies to take her fear away.

Hearing is a deeply participatory experience. It engulfs. In what was now complete darkness, the swamp immersed me in a harmony of sounds. I should have been terrified and yet I was strangely at peace. The sounds were not that of dissonance but of euphony. I began to participate with the swamp. There was little sense of personal boundaries, and her communal nature overwhelmed me. She talked, I listened. But not in a linear fashion, it was more like a noisy din of  “in-my-face” grace in three hundred and sixty degrees surround sound.

The smells made my head swirl. A decaying earthiness like the finest Cabernet, and floral scents of honeysuckle rivaling the finest Sauternes pervaded my being. I felt myself wafting deeper into an unfamiliar world with a numinous aroma that was intoxicating. Was I dying? Or was I just beginning to live?

The written morbidness of my Christian orthodoxy began to whisper from the past, “in the midst of life we are in death,” but the mysterium fascinans of the swamp began to respond “in the midst of death, Randy, you are in life.” As I continued to listen, it was like a slow sacred self-baptism, an exorcism of the demons of my past in this unlikely temple of the divine.

The bogs and quicksands of life had made me doubt a hard bottom, a foundation upon which to build my future. My dreams. Sinking deeper, I frantically hoped this swamp would indeed have a bottom. The pains and terrors overwhelming me, made me realize I had come, suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear, this mysterium tremendum, is due to the in-compatibility of man’s egotism and divine purity, between man’s self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God.

Could this swamp be hell? Or could it be scaring the hell out of me?

I sensed a dreadful emptiness. Covered with clay and mud, I was cocooned by the swamp and no longer able to sense the rush of earthly power, the flush of religious success, or the crush of popularity.

Could it be a holy emptiness?

Or could it be what true freedom feels like?

Could it be the place where there is “nothing left to lose?” Where love has no strings attached?

I suddenly felt overwhelmed by a sense of complete trust, complete peace and complete joy.

There in the heart of the swamp, I stretched out my tired body and soul and let them rest. For how long, I do not know.

Far from being a hellish place of disease and malaise, I realized the swamp had instead offered me a glimpse of the numinous. A sacred place where I lost desire to ask questions about the past or to speculate about the future—replaced by a desire for oneness with the divine, without fear, without guilt or shame, without worries.

As I slowly opened my eyes and raised to peer upward over the now high edges of the walls of my “grave,” I glimpsed through the swirling mist, what I thought was the faint permanent rose hues of a new day.

Thoughts?