ABSTRACT
In some ways, Deep Travel, when it puts in a sudden appearance, is like having jumped into a different "first skin"—it feels as if at any moment we can molt the outside edge we were born with or let it melt away, leaving something more transparent and flexible and responsive, less armored against or oblivious to the world we no longer seem so shut off from. It's a great discovery, finding that we've been gifted with senses that are already capable—without any retrofitting—of acting either as a wall or an open door. Even more remarkably, we don't actually have to do anything cumbersome or effortful, like shedding a skin or a shell, to effect this changeover. Sometimes Deep Travel seems to reach out for us—the way Joan Webster, the heroine of I Know Where I'm Going! couldn't avoid seeing a rainbow on Mull or hearing the seals singing. At other moments it simply arrives for no obvious reason. But when this happens, what is it that we do, or that is done to us? Where and what within us is the mechanism, the trigger, the shift key the entry point?
