Yes, in that moment it was aliveness. It's why I head out in the way that I do - it's one of the most important things in my life.
But this is interesting though... what am I but an empty vessel in which these experiences pass? Co-incidentally I got the Zen Commandments by Dean Sluyter off my shelf earlier, - bit of a hit and miss book but he has this gift for putting complex ideas simply and clearly, in my view - and he describes this as unjoining the dots.
'We're not the constellations. We're not the stars. If we're anything, we're the endless sky within which the stars appear to appear.'
So if I am this empty thing - this dead thing, if you like - then my feeling alive is a star passing through. And so my thoughts, emotions, preferences. Stars passing through the empty space of my own nothingness. So that means that I don't need to identify with any of it - I'm not happy or sad, for example - these are mere stars in the sky of this thing I think of as me.
The nature of Tao is like infinite space
From whose boundless depths everything arises.
Though forever flowing, it never overflows;
The rough edges, it smooths,
Complexity, it simplifies,
It softens glare and unifies the particular.
An eternal deep of unknown origin,
The source of the Divine perhaps.
Tao Te Ching
