I was on a cave tour many years ago, and it was your typical screaming, squabbling, arguing, yelling, completely uncouth families.
Just as we were exiting the cave, I could tell that the guide sensed my frustration. I reached into my pocket, open my wallet and slipped him at 20 and just said my girlfriend and I are going to stay back for a while okay.
He nodded knowingly and slid the 20 into his pocket.
Anyways, the experience was spending an entire hour deep in a cave, in complete pitch blackness, without being able to hear a single sound. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.
My first total solar eclipse. It was truly breath taking. I've seen another one since then but the first one was truly special.
It's wild.
Air changing, animals responding. Shit must have been transcendental in the past.
I caught the 2009 total eclipse here and it was awe-inspiring. It was also the longest solar eclipse expected for the 21st century at 6 minutes, 39 seconds, so it made a deep impression on everybody standing on the roof of the apartment block to watch it.
I don't wish to see a second, though, because the next one will be in the year 2200 and that would mean I'd still be alive in 200 years. Not something I want.
Seeing aurora borealis on new years eve.I've seen the Aurora Borealis hundreds of times. (Living in the high arctic does that to you.) But I have heard them only once.
I'd like to hear them again.
A first kiss with a new crush.
Being at the controls of an airplane.
I want to see Cats, on stage, live, again.
Re-visit some places. Prague, Tartu, Kyoto come to mind.
And I would kind of like that "new love" feeling again, except it would either get messy or be preceded by unpleasantness or tragedy.
Being in a 1st world country
Well, I gotta say that seeing a Monet in person wrecked my brain.
But my favorite painter is van Gogh, which I guess is pretty fucking common; and my favorite sculptor is Rodin. I've never seen anything of theirs in person.
I don't know if it would have that same consciousness altering effect because I've not only already been exposed to art, but art like theirs, and even reproductions of them. But I sure as fuck wish I could travel and find out.
It's one of those curses where I could never afford to take off of work to see them, even if they'd been close enough I could afford to get there. Now that I'm disabled, I have the time, but even less money. But, even if I saved, I can't really travel far at all. Even a day's drive is murder that takes days to recover from.
I keep my eye out, though. I hope one of the museums I can reach will have access, or something like that.
DC has a lot of Monet’s and it’s free to see them if you’re in the US.
What about them blew your mind? I thought they were pretty but didn’t have the same experience.
That's where I saw my first one :)
I grew up fairly unexposed to art that wasn't of a fairly generic sort. Essentially stuff that was purely representational. Pictures of birds, hunting scenes, that kind of thing.
Monet, or at least the one I saw that made the school group I was with late because I was literally just standing there and gaping for a half hour, it was like looking at the world through a new pair of glasses after years of not knowing you needed them. Not because it was made things sharp, it was that he captured the beauty of things in a way I didn't even know was possible.
It was so alive. There was so much movement and texture. It reminded me of when I would walk through the woods alone, everything unfolding around me in this riot of color and beauty as I discovered the next gap in the trees and stepped into a meadow.
It felt real in a way that photography couldn't, that the more realistic painters couldn't. Every inch I looked at unfolded another layer of the experience. Yes, it looked like the place, but it was more like being in that place than anything I'd ever seen before.
The fact that someone could transport me like that, and do it in such a seemingly impossible way was magical. This wasn't art like in comic books, or on office walls, it was life, captured in this rippling, vibrant explosion of paint.
There are actually quite a few casts of Rodin's famous The Thinker statue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Thinker_sculptures including Cleveland, Louisville, Detroit, NYC, Washington DC, and San Francisco.
A bunch more "later casts" further down the above wikipedia page.
There's probably one near you.
Other Rodin pieces usually accompany The Thinker in museums.
I've experienced this like 3 to 4 times in total but the first time you fire up a new toaster makes this smell like nothing else and I find it extremely pleasant. It's just impossible to replicate.
The ‘golden needle’ penetrated the veil of my mind. This is a term for a brief moment of enlightenment.
I once solved a Zen koan and experienced just such a moment. It was a spiritual, emotional, and physiological experience.
———
A koan is a zen riddle which can’t be solved by logic. Probably the most famous example is ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping’.Having a family.
