As the magma continues flowing, it melts through the sea-floor floating on top of it, oozing immense valleys of newly reborn crust which form majestic submarine mountain ranges as they spread, sometimes pushing the continents before them, and sometimes diving beneath the continents into a fiery cauldron that re-melts the crust and its planktonic sedimentary rock made up of my breath. I feel the hard rocky mineral bones of my hand - mountain bones, plankton bones, breathy bones, wind bones, magma bones. I have become the consciousness of flow!

I feel that I exist not as a body separate from the other things around me. I seem to be - to have become - a flowing stream of energy, a swirl of material emanating from all else and returning into all else in an infinitely vast and complex dance. I drink the cool wetness of the flowing stream which pours into me like a waterfall - cascading into my salty, oceanic bloodstream whose heart-pulsed waves bath the living molecular membranes of my cellular shores.

As each wave washes over them, their hydrophilic phospholipids eagerly embrace the watery stream molecules, enticing them to enter into the insides of my cells - to join my biochemical dance of life - becoming part of me! Other water molecules trickle out of my cells, into my lymph swamps and marshes, and slowly flow back into my coursing bloodstream. Waters pour out of my body. Some joins the winds as evaporated perspiration to merge with the swirling, flowing clouds and mists. Some will leave me as urine and flow back into streams and into the soil carrying with it rocky minerals from my blood and bones and organs. My rocky waters flow into and become one with the myriad soil creatures and the roots of plants and trees. I flow into them!

Hungrily, I chew some hazelnuts and dried apricots from my trail mix and savor their textures. A current of water molecules flow through my mouth from my salivary glands coaxing tiny molecular bits of the nuts and fruit to travel along with them. Some touch my taste buds and nasal passages and become chemically bonded to molecular receptors on my cells' surfaces, causing flows of electrical energy to travel to my brain where I perceive the hazelnut and apricot connections as acrid and sweet flavors and complex aromas.

I swallow, feeling the nuts and fruit move deeper and deeper into me with each peristaltic wave of muscular contraction. In my gut, the pieces of nuts and fruit, now broken down into soluble sugars and amino acids and fatty acids flow into my bloodstream and are carried by it into all of my cells where some will be taken into me to become my own molecular structure - me. Deep inside my cells, the sweet apricot sugars, merge in joyous ecstasy with the vibrant beech tree oxygen, carried to me as wind from the forest leaves. Their fiery union releases stored sunlight energy in a burst that powers my dance of life. I'm warmed by the heat of this vigorous biochemical jig.

I give my heat to the Universe, it flows and radiates from me. I am connected to the trees and bushes that bore these fruits and nuts. and to the life-giving wind. They have become me and I have become them. I, in turn, give back to them, in my out-breath, gaseous carbon, freed in this same hot, energetic dance which gives me every instant of life. My carbon, given by me to the winds, is taken in by the trees and used to form the very molecular backbones of their bodies. I have become an ever changing pattern of swirls interconnecting with the flowing all - an instantaneous awareness of a portion of the universal spirals of the mysterious all.

I see a squirrel on the bank of the stream, watching me eat my trail mix as he eats nuts from the ancient hickory tree near me, whose tortuous roots enwrap a boulder at the edge of the creek and absorb its water and minerals. Our gazes lock. I stare deeply into his dark eyes. Colored light quanta flowing ninety three million miles from fusing solar atomic nuclei reverberate between us, entering each other's retinal cells - stimulating electrically charged rocky minerals to flow along our nervous pathways, altering our perceptions of the universe, and intimately connecting us to each other and to the nuclei of the hydrogen atoms passionately fusing in our star.

We are conjoined in a radiant galactic dance which alters us and connects us to each other and to the infinite Great Mystery. The squirrel, moving jerkily, rapidly digs a hole in the dark soil, buries a nut, takes a few steps and leaves some droppings - scats, containing undigested bits of Hickory nut which will flow into, become part of, and power, the soil bacteria. From them will flow transformed mineral compounds that will fertilize the Hickory tree. We are all connected in a single flow.

As I watch, a red-tailed hawk swoops and plummets from high in the sky and grabs the terrified squirrel in his sharp, curving talons and carries him up to the highest branches of the Hickory tree whose nuts the squirrel was eating. The squirrel is devoured before my eyes, his substance becoming the hawk, his life energy becoming the hawk's life energy. With a shrill whistling call, the hawk dives into the flowing wind, letting some guano drop down to the base of the tree and into the stream where its milky-white mineral particles mingle with the water molecules and flow with them until becoming parts of plants and animals and perhaps me, once again.

I stretch and savor the warmth created in my flesh as the midday sunlight rays enter and interact with me. I feel one with these deep invisible forces - the released energy pent-up inside starry primordial hydrogen nuclei since the dawn of time. I am connected to infinity.

As I sit comfortably sprawled mid-stream on my boulder deep in the Appalachian mountain wilderness, I know that I have received a precious gift, the knowledge that I am a small eddy current connected to and not separate from the ubiquitous universal spirals of energy and matter that are all things. I have joined the dance!