AD 2003, and the second year of the presidency of George W. Bush, Monterey, California

"Jesus!"

A brilliant shaft of orange light, as brief as a camera flash, hits the windshield, making it opaque, like a blank, glowing movie screen. In split-second blindness, I hit the brakes. Squinting, I strain to focus. Painful brightness. Then suddenly, like a magician's reveal, the light's gone. Sight returns.

As the heavy Benz skids, a rabbit darts out of the pine and oak forest to my right.

"Shit!"

It stops dead in front of my car, takes a frightened look at me, and then bounds across the road. I wrestle the wheel to the right. In hot pursuit of the rabbit, a golden mountain lion veers so close that its tail whacks my left headlamp as the car slides on the pine needled asphalt. I avoid hitting the lion but almost slam my front end into the thick trunk of a live oak.

The rabbit's pause to look at me was enough to make the difference between life and death. The lion's jaws lock onto its neck, quickly executing the kill and then swinging the limp corpse twice, the rabbit's lifeless legs quivering as misfiring nerves play out their last gig. It's now become a lion's breakfast, and I'm shaking like a plucked guitar string.

"What the f —"

I left my house only a minute ago. I grew up in this area, but I've never seen a mountain lion before. Rangers post warning signs on all the hiking trails up and down the coastal range, but strangely, the first one I ever see nearly dances with my Mercedes in a gated golf community.

Without missing a beat, dead prey firmly locked in its jaws, the lion stands there, pinning me with a fierce focus. Without hurrying, it moves up the hillside, vanishing perfectly into the scrubby bushes beneath the oak trees. The quick life-and-death struggle is over before I can register my near wreck, but my heart pounds furiously. I feel the adrenaline pouring into my hands, and they tremble as I keep my death grip on the steering wheel.

Whoa! Am I blacking out? Was there some chemical or drug laced into my coffee?

Last night's dream was like that. My memory cancels out most dreams when I wake up, yet the residual feelings remain. Especially the disturbing ones I've been having lately. Yeah, I remember now. A leopard was chasing me through woods like these, and I went diving for safety in a black hole near a stream, like the adrenaline-junkie spelunkers who go freefalling into those yawning, massive caves in Mexico. Yet, chased or not, I wanted to dive in. Had to.

Mountain lions, rabbits, dreams — what kind of batshit-crazy, Alice-in-Wonderland crap is going on here?

Now I'm drenched in sweat, my breaths pumping in and out of me, mouth caked-clay dry like Death Valley in summer, and I take a gulp from the bottle of Fiji resting in the square cup holder I had made for the car. Still shaking, I decide to get back on the road and discover that I've absently turned the ignition off.

When did that happen? Snap out of it, Jack!

I start it up and edge onto the road, slowly making my way to the community entrance. When I reach the gate, I wave to the young guard and roll my window down.

"Morning, Mr. Castro," he says, way too cheerful for this time of day. He's studying to be a minister. "How 'bout those 'Niners last night?"

"Yeah, good game. Hey, just saw a mountain lion, Josh. Damn near had a wreck. Hit my front headlight."

Okay, my voice sounds normal. Jack is back.

Josh looks shocked and then eyes my car's front end. He moves closer, runs his hand over it, squats, and looks underneath.

"Car's fine. Not a scratch. But I'll report that. Never seen one around here!"

He asks me for specifics, but I cut him off.

"Later, Josh. Meeting in San Jose."

"Go!" He waves me off, and I make the requisite left onto the highway leading to Starbucks where I'm meeting my assistant, Tyler. We are heading up to San Jose for the conference I'm speaking at this morning. I'm in crop insurance. My firm handles most of the gigantic ag-business policies in the sprawling Salinas Valley and California's Central Valley beyond. A dry cough takes me out of my thoughts, and suddenly it feels like liquid lead pumping through my veins. Starbucks is not happening for me right now. I need a few minutes alone.

My eyes land on a familiar sign for the small wilderness park where my two teenage daughters and I often hike on weekends. Ordinarily, the words teenage and hike aren't two words that go together, but the girls do trek along with Dad on a regular basis. Other weekends, my non-hiker wife, Sharon, joins us as we sail Monterey Bay.

I try to distract my thoughts and think of my family as I struggle to chill out a bit. It's not working.

Impulsively, I veer sharply to the right across the lanes to the exit. The guy behind me slams on his brakes and lays on the horn as I rumble onto the narrow road leading into a small parking area. Even though there is no one else around, I move neatly between the white lines of the first space. I leave the car idling, and even though it's fifty degrees, I turn on the air conditioning. I try to lengthen my breaths, but short gasps are all I can manage. My clammy fingers still grip the steering wheel like it's a goddamn lifeline. I lift them off, and the joints respond with pain. Then I force them to unlock my noose of a tie. Allowing the lids of my eyes to close, I decide I just need a minute. I reflexively gulp some air and smell the forest.

Man up, Castro!

When I open my eyes, I am surprised to see that I am not alone after all. Close by, there's a homeless man rummaging through the trash containers for his daily bread, which consists of cans and plastic bottles.

Why am I here? My actions are unpredictable, and I like predictability — and logic and probability. Everyone admires that about me. In fact, they rely on it, which is why I'm invited frequently to be on boards. Even the Roman Catholic bishop recently asked me to help with the restoration of the old mission church in nearby Carmel-by-the Sea, and I'm only nominally Catholic — barely nominally.

Come on, Jack. Get it together. I'm okay. I've got fifteen minutes to kill before meeting Tyler.

Mindlessly, I grab the slice of cold cheese pizza wrapped in wax paper that lays on the passenger-side floor. It flew off the seat during the dance with the mountain lion. My wife passed my favorite breakfast to me as I bolted out the door this morning. I brush off the paper, good as new. Maybe I'll take a bite or two in a minute. Pizza in hand, I get out of the car.

As I approach the homeless man, I see that he is barely more than a boy, maybe twenty-five — twenty-six, tops. Under a ragged woolen cap drawn partially over an unexpected pile of thick blond hair, I see his deep-blue eyes pinning me. This guy's carrying a load of Viking DNA, that's for sure. His skin's the color of rust, weathered beyond his years, and I can see that his brief life has been tough. He backs up a step, guarded, as if I'm there to take him in.

Seriously, kid? I mean, am I a ranger in a German luxury car?

I check my self-aggrandizing thoughts and muster up some humility. There's a tragedy standing here before me. I raise the palms of my hands, thumb across the wax-paper-wrapped pizza, showing that I mean him no harm.

"I am doing nothing wrong," he says.

"I'm not here for trouble," I reply as he gives me the practiced once-over, glances at my car, then back to me, thinking for a moment. "Do you have any spare money, for I am hungry?" he says, but I smell the wine on his breath.

"And thirsty too?" I ask sarcastically, immediately regretting it.

"No. Well, yes. I drank some leftover wine from these old bottles and some beer from these cans," he says, pointing down to the contents of his half-filled trash bag, "But it was all old. It tasted not good."

His speech sounds off, correct but not right. I shove a twenty at him, and he accepts it, glancing at it briefly. Funny, but it seems like he doesn't care about the paper money at all — though he has a definite interest in the pizza.

"Some bread would be good," he says. Calling pizza bread sounds weird, kind of foreign, even though the kid's accent is totally Californian. Dismissing it and being hungry myself — and therefore not so generous — I tear it in half and give the bigger part of the triangle to him.

"Thank you, sir," he says, eating a chunk of it instantly. "Very good! God bless you." It's the ritual blessing every homeless person seems to give. I often notice that only homeless people voice a blessing to me these days.

After a moment of watching him chew, I'm finding that this little exchange is calming me down. Strange. So, I decide to expand my peace and give him the other half as well.

Glancing at my watch, I decide I can do it: take that moment by myself. I feel better, but I still have to walk and get some air, be outside with the trees — just for a few minutes. A chill runs through me again, and then I'm flushed, my heart racing. I've heard of people having panic attacks, so maybe this is what it feels like. I start to half jog down the path into the forested area.

"Ah, sir, where are you going? I mean, you are not dressed for the trail." There's real concern in his voice.

"Only taking a walk, kid."

Nothing unusual here — just a guy heading off into the woods wearing an Armani blazer, a gold Patek Philippe, and a pair of handmade Italian loafers. Totally normal. If he rolls me, the kid won't have to go Dumpster-diving for quite some time.

Wincing as those arrogances pass through my mind, I hear the man coming up behind me, and I go into defensive mode, sensing I'm going to have a problem with him. I spin around and glare fiercely into his dirty face. Ninja Insurance Guy! Another camera-flash of orange light, here and then gone.

Off-balance and distracted, I blink and then straighten up to resume my tough-guy posture.

"What?" I say as menacingly as I can.

"Nothing, nothing, sir," he says, backing off. "But take great care. I mean, just be careful." Another odd turn of phrase. I haven't heard anyone except characters in classic British TV shows say something like "take great care."

The orange light flashing, this weird-talking homeless kid, the dead rabbit and the lion, the dream leopard — all of these bizarre, random events defy any summing up. My brain can't piece the puzzle together, though it desperately seeks a connecting reason. As I turn again, walking down toward the seasonal streambed, the park-bench Shakespeare shouts out one last thing, irritating me with a very formally phrased warning.

"And, sir, do not be afraid."

Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart. This light guided me more surely than the light of noonday To the place where he was awaiting me.

— St. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, stanzas 3, 4 (ca. AD 1579)

AD 2003, a forest near Monterey

Pounding into the woods, determined to reach the creek, compulsion rockets me forward with each step — another goal, another achievement. I'm stressed to the max, I know. I've been waking up drenched in sweat this last week, leaking saltwater from every pore. I get it. Mine is a jam- packed, moving target of a life. We take nice vacations, but even those serve an educational purpose for my girls, so we're nonstop tourists on every trip. And I guess it's obvious to everyone around me. Even Bronson, my old frat buddy, summed me up after one of our annual hikes in the Big Sur Mountains two weeks ago.

"Dude, you like your life to churn," he said. "Nothing's changed since Stanford — except your address." Of course, he's one to talk. He runs a Fortune 500 financial company on Wall Street, so he is on the move twenty-four seven himself.

But Bronson's right. I do like my life to churn. Boredom, too much quiet, scares the shit out of me. When things quiet down too much, I'll stir it all up again, both at the office and at home. But I also know that eventually my body will give me some pushback, and as I continue down the trail, I let myself guess that's what this is. Stress from the churn. Fatigue aided and abetted by the disturbing circle-of-life moment I just witnessed.

Not quite. There was that dream leopard too.

Something feels out of control.

Where am I going? The sensation returns, the tickle in the center of my chest. It's an ache more than pain. There's a feeling attached to it, always the heavy feeling, like lead. Not sadness but something akin to emptiness. Hollow. Makes no sense. I know my life's incredibly full. By every metric America has, I possess all a person could want, and what I don't have, I know how to get.

Walking deeper into the forest, I can't hear the highway traffic anymore. It's cooler in here. I check my watch and see that I have ten more minutes. But this is where I want to be, have wanted to be. For almost a month, maybe closer to six weeks now, I've felt this same gnawing hunger within me, a deep longing to discover something I can't put into words. It's eluded me, staying far enough away to be just out of reach, like that mirage I see when driving in the desert, that watery lake that ripples on the highway but keeps receding as I approach it.

Like the unreachable mirage lake, this longing has haunted me, disturbing me at the office and at home. Last week I made a conscious effort to stuff this damn feeling back into the mental hole out of which it came. As usual, I was successful — at first. For the balance of the day it was gone, and I thought I had it licked. That night, the first dream came, and the following morning at 4:41, I awoke, terrified, drenched in sweat. After the morning shower, I felt the longing claw at me again. Like today, I can stuff it down for an hour or two. When I think it's gone for good and I get back to being my upbeat self, enjoying my life, something like that bloody moment with the mountain lion slaps me like a backhand across the face, plunging me right back into it.

Wineskins.

Yeah, it did begin that night six weeks ago when the Mission's pastor, a tan Sicilian-American who as a teenager mowed my parent's lawn, spoke at our building restoration meeting about old wineskins and new wine, something from the Bible. Apparently, you can't transfer new wine into old wineskins because they'll burst. I know all about wine, because much of the Salinas Valley is now dedicated to growing grapes — except, of course, that they don't use clay jars for vinting or animal bladders for carrying wine these days. I have never seen a wineskin, so Father Joe's point was lost on me. We were there to discuss retrofitting the old church. Was he arguing to tear it down and build a new one?

"I'm not talking about structures or property improvements," he explained to a board member who asked that very question. "I'm talking about us stepping out of the old and familiar ways, our comfort zones — those old wineskins that are no longer elastic — to expand anew into what we are really here on earth to do."

I knew I was on earth primarily to sell insurance, so I found myself still missing his point. I chided myself for becoming involved in a quasi-religious thing like this committee. I knew better.

"What does this old wineskin, new wineskin mean?" some mature, carefully coifed woman asked.

I was thinking, Jesus! How long is this sermon thing going to go on? I have notes to prepare for the office meeting tomorrow.

"In the first century, vintners would take the grape juice and put it into a bag made from the skin of a goat and tie it off," Father Joe said. "As the juice fermented into wine, it expanded the skin, which was very elastic. After the vintner emptied the wine out, he or she could not use the old skin again because its elasticity was gone; it had become brittle. If filled again with new wine, it would burst under the pressure."

I was getting this point and found it spot on. Sometimes I feel like I'm about to burst, like today. All this made me more uncomfortable and antsy.

"Father Joe, excuse me, but what does this have to do with ensuring the church's roof doesn't cave in during an earthquake?" I asked him. He needed to tie this together because I was not there for Bible study.