The Ride Home

Gypsy stood up, only to stagger across the frosty grass, struggling to stay upright beneath the night sky. The darkened hockey field spun around him—or so it felt.

Regaining composure and locking eyes with his best friend, he slurred, “Sean… I’m wasted man, I feel so… aargh… sick.”

The two teenagers had been smoking a particularly potent strain of weed, acquired by Sean earlier that day.

Gathering his thoughts together, Gypsy passed the Orchy Orange Juice bottle – which had the addition of a neighbour’s garden hose fitted with a cone formed from a piece of aluminium cut from a coke can – back to Sean.

The field sat at the bottom of Gal Crescent, a street on a steep hill in Moorebank. It was a fair distance from Gypsy’s home in Lansvale, and the night had already stretched on.

“Hey Dig, I gotta go. I’m so blazed man… that’s chronic shit,” Gypsy slurred, grabbing the handlebars of his customised Redline BMX—a prized possession. He gave a hazy farewell and began walking slowly toward the road that would lead him home.

With a bit of a stumble, Sean began his own short stroll to his home on Gal Crescent. “Catch ya Digger,” he called out to Gypsy, an ever-present smile in his voice that left an undercurrent of warmth breathing through the air.

Riding now, the rhythmic pedalling and the crisp night air against Gypsy’s face steadied his mind, though his thoughts still tumbled like waves crashing onto a distant shore.

The road ahead was long, but familiar—a flat stretch Gypsy had ridden home countless times before. At seventeen, his legs could eat up the distance without thinking, his body still wired for motion even when his mind was fogged.

At first, the ride felt like any other. But tonight, the stars would catch his eye—and with them, something far greater… He didn’t know it yet, but this ride wouldn’t just be taking him to Lansvale, it would be taking him all the way home.

Hitting his stride, Gypsy settled into a steady rhythm on the Redline, heart beating fast and strong, his head starting to clear.

He felt at one with the bike, attuned to every point, a sense of unity—the pedals, the chainwheel, the back tyre spinning, road gliding beneath him. This was his element, this was where he felt most unbound.

The exhilaration of speeding through the night enthralled him with a sense of freedom. His legs pumped, his mind drifted, the wheels hummed — any sickness or mental fog, left far behind in the hypnotic sway of motion.

The clear night sky caught his gaze as he rode down an empty lane of the Hume Highway, just one hundred and fifty metres from the sandstone bridge that crossed Cabramatta Creek.

The cold air was sharp in his lungs. Looking up—suddenly, the stars weren’t just distant points of light. They were immense, burning beacons of curiosity, now calling on him to ponder existence itself.

To his left, trees silhouetting an open field, pulled his mind deeper into contemplation.

An image of a tiny seed took form within his imagination. ‘Every one of those towering trees has started as a seed,’ he thought, ‘so small, so unassuming.’

Looking back to the stars, Gypsy began to notice how it all somehow seemed connected.

Earth orbits Sun – Moon circles Earth – Earth is spinning. Now seeing that everything was turning, orbiting, shifting… all within some vast, ordered system.

‘Everything…’, he questioned. ‘Everything in the universe has to be doing exactly what it’s doing—just for that one seed to grow into a tree – Waaa.’

And in that moment, his curiosity transformed into – Awe.

Pure, unadulterated awe.

Shaking his head in what was now a sudden moment of disbelief, Gypsy reached to grasp the truth of just how much had to align—for just one single tree to grow… or for that matter–how anything actually existed at all.

Surging with wonder, curiosity, and wide-eyed bewilderment, Gypsy shouted to the universe,

“How… the fuck… does this all work?”

The question mark hadn’t even dropped to end that sentence when suddenly…

He was everywhere—no longer separate from anything, but utterly one with the entirety of reality.

Part of every tree, throughout the sky, across the oceans, within the atoms, in every process – everywhere – all at once.

The answer to the most fundamental question came not in words, but in experience.

In that instant, knowledge of every force, process, and principle sustaining reality coursed through his awareness like a flood bursting through a dam.

And then suddenly — he was back.

Shouting out a sound of pure astonishment, loud, primal, a scream, a gasp, a roar of total bewilderment. Maybe all of them at once. But wrapped inside it was something more—an amazement too vast for words.

Cold air now rushing against his face, pedals still pumping under his feet, the bridge was just seventy-five metres ahead.

“Holy fucking shit, I know everything!” Gypsy shouted, the words bursting out loud and unfiltered through the crisp silent night and ringing back into his own ears.

The knowledge was still there. Every answer. Every truth.

Moments ago, he had been the knowing.

No distance, no question, no seeking—only absolute, unbroken is-ness.

Now, he was separate. As if upon the edge of an ocean so vast that it had no horizon, the weight of knowledge pressing against him. He knew—with a certainty deeper than thought—everything.

However, like waking from a dream, with each successive pedal, the harder he tried to cling to the knowledge, the faster it crumbled as if it were rising mist vanishing into sunlight.

His thoughts, the words he knew, his capacity to understand… none of them were enough to hold onto the volume of knowledge that he had experienced.

Then— it was all… gone.

But the experience itself? That would never leave him.

For the first time in his life, Gypsy had perceived reality beyond the limits of his mind or that of any of his human senses.

It would be wrong to say he had merely contemplated the underlying principles of reality. No— his awareness literally expanded to encompass all of reality in a single moment.

A complete conscious connection—not only with the reality he had known, but with the very essence that both created and sustained it.

One thing now remained. A knowing.

The knowing that everything was connected, everything was one. That nothing in reality had been left to chance… everything that is, is known.

And perhaps most astonishing of all— he thought to himself, ‘Reality exists, within consciousness itself.’

This wasn’t a conception, it was an experience.

Pedalling over the bridge, thoughts continued to race—confusion, clarity, exhalation, a sense of wonderment that could only be reserved for this type of encounter.

Then a quiet phrase entered his mind—

“Expand Into One.”

Those words encapsulated everything he had just experienced, an awakening that would shape his entire life.

Reality, he now knew like never before, was far greater than his five senses could ever perceive.

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This story is dedicated, in part, to the memory of Sean Devlin. His sense of humour formed the basis of my own and his logical musings and sense of adventure have stayed with me, long after his soul passed from this world. – Maximillian Alexander

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