I tried to catch God in a butterfly net. That’s what I felt like I was attempting recently on the dirtbike at my childhood property: opening up the throttle on an autumn day to capture a sensory snapshot of memory and longing in the smell of the air and the rush of the wind. Velocity itself seems the excipient of potent experience; it’s hard to deny something exceptional is happening when you’re simply going fast.

Add to speed the visual and olfactory cocktail of Fall in a deciduous forest—a forest in the backyard of one’s own upbringing, no less—and the draught passing your soul’s lips is one fit for the intoxication of even the least sentimental (and I’d be more accurately described as one of the most, in that regard). Needless to say, the autumnal experience on a four-stroke Yamaha left my head and heart more than a little spiritually buzzed.

With each motorized pass up and down the tree-lined field, I was trying to gulp in something as copious and rush-inducing as the wind delightfully buffeting my face and hair (I’d left my helmet behind on account of planning to only drive a brief test-run, a fact which—while being less safe—I didn’t regret for the intensity of experience it occasioned). Each run with the bike down the same path, across the same field, cycling through the machine’s five gears and then back again, left me feeling like I’d tasted a little of something that I wanted all of.

Every repetition of the drive felt like another swipe at an intensely beautiful and mesmerizing Butterfly with the oversized net of myself. My whole being was the implement I threw at this Essence, this Coalescing, this Alluring Wholeness of Happening, that, in this moment, felt like it was realized as a conglomerate of my own life’s experiences. If I could cinch the edges of my mind tight around the intoxicating Wholeness teasing its Presence in these aligned sensations—crisp air, decomposing leaves, locomotive personal velocity—then I’d capture the longing contained in the childhood memories that this same experience evoked. If I could take a satisfying bite of the Fruit I was smelling, I might find my mouth around a seed that I could spit out and plant for myself, in hopes it would grow into a plant that could yield more of the same fruit after its own kind, and bear its lovely, sweet, Past-perfumed flesh ever into my future.

Metaphors mix like the gas of a noisy 2-stroke engine when butterflies and fruit and motorcycles are cobbled together in an attempt to capture God. Everything about where we’ve been adds another loop of thread to the Net of Us we can use to try and wrap ourselves around the Fruit of the Divine, Its intoxicating scent wafting from the branches It hangs from on familiar trees. When you smell that forest—and you happen to have left the helmet behind—go around for another pass.