A shallow sea used to cover this land that is now shared by the states of New Mexico and Texas. Plant life and creatures gathered at its rim to form a coral reef. Times changed, hundreds of millions of years passed by, and the reef found itself buried thousands of feet below a desert floor. Then we move to comparatively recent times, ten to twelve millions years ago, when the Earth�s plates shifted and the reef cracked. The pressure pushed it more than a mile high. Men and women evolved to the level where they could give phenomena a name. The reef that reared to a mile in height was called the Guadalupe Mountains.

The sun dipped below the land and bats skimmed the roadside, their silhouettes shivering within their speed as they snuffled insects caught against their wings. They poured like smoke out of the Carlsbad Caverns, hundreds of thousands of the creatures streaming from their daytime roost on a ceiling of the western hemisphere�s largest sequence of caves. These Caverns are sited within the northern tip of the Guadalupe Mountains. The bats were flagging us down.

I had flown in from Scotland in pursuit of a dream. A group of people had gathered in a large tent to watch a film called The Spiritual Life but the soundtrack had failed. Mounting a ladder, I began the narration.

It was easy at first. I could identify a still lake as Nirvana, and the beaded African in his glossy black skin as a spiritual warrior. The ending of the film silenced me in wonder, however. It showed a gleaming city of white stretched across a slanting mountaintop, a companion mountain buttressed to its side. I had no words to describe such beauty, and so waited for the closing credits to roll across the film. The letters scrolled by, informing me that this holy site was in the Guadalupe Mountains.

Some dreams are random, the pressures of our daily lives escaping in streaming flashes of nonsense. Other dreams carry structure, are filled with light, and come charged with the power of revelation. Spiritual traditions accept that some dreams are visions, and I recognized such a quality in this dream I had of the Guadalupe Mountains. My body became electric for a while, absorbing its charge.

This vision occurred in my apartment in Glasgow. Its details stayed clear in my memory. The next morning I checked my atlas for reference to Guadalupe Mountains, and found only one such range on the planet. Some months later I booked tickets to go and visit a friend in Santa Fe.

We crossed into Texas and pitched camp in Guadalupe National Park. A stag and a skunk sauntered past as we gazed into a black and busy sky. Brief tails of white trailed shooting stars as they arched themselves out of existence.

We scanned a map to see where to climb. The different peaks had redolent names, often linked to the times when the Apache took shelter in these mountains. One was called Guadalupe Peak, Our Lady of Guadalupe being the name given to the Mexican apparition of the Virgin Mary. The track toward it led from the parking lot and wound round the first broad buttress of a hill to climb out of sight.

Loading ourselves with water, we set out.

Fire had swept through the area the previous year to roast some of the cacti where they grew. It reduced some trees to charcoal spindles of themselves, but the fire clung to the desert floor. Climbing higher we found the mountain was living again. The sunset red of the bark of the Texan Madrone tree peeled back to reveal golden flesh beneath. Its smooth branches hoisted bundles of dark green leaves in the air, like pom-poms on the naked arms of cheer-leaders.

On a fallen tree a small bird danced and bobbed. It was a canyon wren and I was pleased to meet it, for James had already taught me its song. Clear notes whistled down from perches tucked against the mountainside. They descended a scale to breathe their last in a note that faded into loss.

My friend James was a Zen lay teacher with strong affinity for the natural world. �Bonsai,� he declared, rendering Japanese and possibly Zen the miniature bushes that seeped roots down through hairline cracks in mottled boulders beside the path. Such vegetation was the root of the Bonsai tradition in Japan, he explained. Folk found these miniature growths on top of Japanese mountaintops and carried them home. Their leaves were dark green and shaped like the fingernails of baby dolls, the bushes never more than inches high but sprawling as though each yearned to be a rainforest.

A bridge of short stout timbers spanned a narrow gorge, and the path wound through high-altitude woodland of Douglas Firs. The summit of 8,749 feet was not far away. The trees sensed the altitude so did not struggle to any great height of their own. Their branches were thick enough to give shade, but sparse enough to let sunlight squeeze through the needles. Chips of white marble were embedded in the path. They caught the sunlight to form a glittering way.

Guadalupe Peak forms the head of its range of mountains, a head that curves round from the red bulk of its body. The path was well-defined and runs at a gentle slope, so it was always a surprise to be able to look down and discover how much height we had gained. The path turned one of its bends and introduced new terrain. The shade of the trees was left behind. We were out in the sunlight once again, and stepping onto a new flank of the mountain that would hold our first view out across to the south.

I stepped backwards to joke with James. We were near the summit. Just a little further and I would have chased my dream to extinction, that dream from Scotland that had pulled me up a Texan mountainside. I laughed and told James to be careful, that I had probably been given this dream so that I could drag him up to this improbable location. He should prepare himself for a revelation.

It was safe to walk backwards because the edge of the path that bordered the drop down the mountain was fringed with bushes. The bushes ended and I turned around.

Guadalupe Peak is the southern edge of the mountain chain, so that the view beyond it is of the Chihuahan desert. Between the peak and the desert is a giant pillar of red rock. It has the name El Capitan and rises sheer. Its highest point is 8,085 feet. Red earth sweeps up to form its apron, held in place by a natural fortified wall of red rock, then the paler monolith soars beyond. Navajo Indians call monoliths like these �sky-supporters�, warriors frozen in stone who will come to the protection of those who approach them in the right way.

From the edge of the path I was looking down at the top of El Capitan. This top had been sliced away so that it faced us with the steep angle of its slope. The slope was gray with jagged edges as its rim, and coated with the soft green of Douglas Firs.

The film that I viewed in my dream had climaxed with the vision of a mountaintop so awesome, so pure, so astonishingly beautiful that my narration was silenced in wonder.

This mountain below me was that exact mountain of my dream. I was viewing it from the very height and angle as were shown in my dream film. There can be nothing more distinctive than the jagged sloping ring of this mountaintop, with a curious buttress like a wing to its right. I recognized the mountain at once.

And I was recognized in return.

In my dream in Glasgow a city was built on this mountain slope, its marble walls shining out white light. This vision now crowned the mountain as I looked down on it, yet its walls were fluid, they reached around me to hold me within themselves. The effect was physical in that my body was overwhelmed by the experience, by the embrace. It was as physical and real and unfathomable as love, a love that rushes in to wrap around your heart and makes you gasp the very best out of yourself.

Waves formed of the substance of love poured from the mountain slope to meet me.

James reached forward to hold me upright, to stop me from collapsing, then released me slowly. I stepped forward from the path and sat down.

I closed my eyes and opened them. The face of the mountain wobbled at the far side of my tears, cleared itself to stand in its framework of blue sky, then folded itself from sight once more as I was wrapped in a fresh gust of weeping.

My little life, with its hopes and fears and ambitions, wept from me.

A swift passed below my head, the arrow of its body shooting a sound through the air. The bird was gone before the air had time to heal. I watched its flight, an instant swoop down the mountainside then a glide back up to vanish beyond the rim of my mountain face. This mountain face that was now as intimate and real as any face I had known.

This mountain face was so close, a mere second for a swift in flight. If I ran a few steps from where I was standing, I could be there.

Death was as close as that. The time before my birth was as close as that too. I recognized this sloping mountain top as the place that I came from, and the place I shall return to when I die. I had been brought back to sit in direct contact with a power behind my existence.

I broke away after some time for us to complete the ascent of Guadalupe Peak. The communion with the force of the mountaintop below stayed with me as I moved.

The path forked for this final short climb. A cohort of dragonflies hovered in front of us, flashing their beacons of blue. When they had attracted our attention we proceeded. They wound each turn ahead of us, flying at our walking pace, never hurrying us, never falling behind, leading us higher till we had no more climbing to do.

Flecks of red flew between the dragonfly blue on the summit. I admired these touches of color as I looked around. To the north of the mountain rose the tree-clad mountains of the Guadalupe range. Salt flats spread across the western view. To the south the light brown stretch of the Chihuahan Desert swept across Texas toward the Mexican border. The south east was studded by the neat cones of small green hills.

There below us, of course, was my mountaintop. A brief rush of air came behind me as I looked down, a zip of energy, and a dragonfly bounced off the crown of my head. And across my chest, in a pattern that moved and thickened, some red flecks from the air had settled to pad through the salt of my sweat.

They were ladybugs. Almost everything was a ladybug. They formed a heaving cover to leaves and twigs and branches and stones. This was an emergence of them. The call had gone out over the Lord knows how many states and they had swarmed in to this highest point of Texas. Texan insects congregate in style. Stay still and we could hear them, racing over each other�s brittle bodies to find a slot and drop into the orgy. The click click click of a million feet rattled beneath the reddened twigs of a bush and we looked in on a wooden box. These creatures rode across the pine of its casing, a living crust an inch high as they humped and mounted each other. The brown casings of last year�s bodies were heaped on the ground, within the bush�s shade.

I brushed the ladybugs from my legs, and climbed down a few steps to picnic on a sandwich beneath a tree on the far side of the mountain. A beetle with a luminous blue back appeared and performed a dance in the dust at our feet, its feet spinning it round in crazy circles while its wings shivered in the air.

I sensed it was dying and focused attention on it. The dance subsided, the beetle grew still, and it let itself die with some peace. The body deserved rest. I took a few stones and leaned them against each other around the insect, then set another on top to roof the miniature tomb.

The dragonfly guides, the ladybugs in their emergent orgy of creation, the beetle in its dance of death, Guadalupe was stirring us all into its drama of life and beyond.

Stepping back down the mountain path I stopped for a while. I settled myself on a white boulder, sitting once again in the place my dream had brought me to.

�There�s no need to hurry,� James advised from behind.

I stood to go, and reached the path. Turning to face my mountain in goodbye, a cool wind rushed up through the stillness of air. I held out my arms and laughed into the wind before crying again and going back to my boulder.

�Is there anything else I should do?� I asked aloud.

James's voice answered me after a while.

�Ask the spirits and guardians of the place for any understanding they can give.�

The suggestion felt right, and I made the silent request. Love surged toward me with greater strength. It was as though many beings were glad to be recognized as individuals. They were pulsing their individual beams of response.

I have been told a Native American story of beings who came to Earth, some from nearby and some from far away. They landed on a mountain top and were so astonished by the beauty of the planet that they could do nothing but stay and worship it. The story could be true of these beings who inhabit Guadalupe. They seemed to thrill to the beauty of existence.

My mountain journey was beginning to take some toll on my senses. I began to suspect, and also to fear, that I was to be a prophet of a new world order. Zoroaster, Mohammed, Moses, even Joseph Smith of the Mormons took some sense of mission up into the mountains and came down to found new religions. They were normal men, surprised out of their skin by the power of revelation. So why not me too?

I sat with the wash of my mountain slope before me, till my worries rose and left to leave me wrapped in a delicious sense of calm. I was not to be quaked open and consequently start a new religion, as I had feared. I was not to be shattered. The sun was dropping but still lent me its warmth. A great peace existed in simply sitting here, and knowing it a beautiful place to be.

I used to think that sacred ritual belonged to priests. I could now see that I was wrong. A ritual arose from within me as a response to the sacredness of the space and the moment. A ceremony opened itself out of a deep sense of thankfulness. I was thankful for my journey to this mountain, and thankful for its span across the Earth. I was thankful for the peace that I had been led to.

Music was conjured from me while I listened. My jaw dropped through juddering patterns of notes and a voice was broadcast from me, bass notes from deep within myself and notes so high they breached the realm of sound. The sounds formed words in a language I could not speak but only sing. These were hymns filled with the essence of praise and thankfulness, songs that reflected back at me from the shimmer of white walls of my visionary city below. My hymns soaked into the silence that hung above the desert land, and I listened to this silence too.

My service completed itself with a prayer. I addressed it to God and our Lady of Guadalupe. It contained my new sense of my purpose in life once I had stepped back down from my mountain.

�Lord and Mother, give me the power to do your work; the strength not to claim it as my own; and the freedom to enjoy it.�

A curious cloud formation marked the otherwise clear blue sky as I sat at our campsite and looked up. Two wisps, one curled into a semi-circle and the other floating nearby as a small blob, just needed a fractional adjustment to form a question mark.

I waited by our tent till night then wandered off in the dark, walking down the road till I could see the silhouette of my mountaintop. I had some questions for it.

�Why can�t I stay here?� I asked. �What�s the point of living any more?�

The answer that came back was a clich�, and a sentimental one at that.

"All you need is love," the mountain said.

The words were pressed silently in my heart. I could hear the mountain voices well now, just as the mountain could read my thoughts. Our dialogue was truly open.

Now we were in dialogue, I wished for something better. I heard "All you need is love" as a kid from the Beatles. I wanted something more unique, more explicit.

"Do you remember snippets about love from recent conversations?" the query came back, recalling to me a relationship I was in that was fresh and still so vulnerable.

�But they were nothing. Just two people struggling with words. You�ve shown me what love is now. It�s something far beyond that. Can�t I stay?�

"Go back," the mountain insisted. "OK, so that talk of love is confused when you think of it now, but it was beautifully lucid at times. Go back. Carry on the conversation. Look at love again and see what you can discover on that human level. Believe us, it�s worth a try."

�OK. I�ll go back to my life, but there has to be a deal. You�ve brought me back. You must stay with me now, even when I walk away. You must make sure I never forget you again.�

"It�s a deal," the mountains replied.

Up in the night sky I saw a single shooting star. It performed a somersault, its trail forming a brief white loop, before it expired.

In the morning we packed away the tent then walked over the low ridge of a nearby hill. Mistletoe garlanded the branches of a tree which dropped shade onto the desert floor. I sat in this shade and looked out. I had come to view my mountaintop for one more time, and sought some final understanding to take with me.

The understanding came. It breezed in with the sight of a golden eagle that was gliding from the desert to curve its flight around El Capitan.

"Here comes an image," the silent voices from the mountain said. "One that can settle in your human mind. One you can transmit so that others can understand. Are you ready?"

I waited. The message came.

"Do you think that eagle gives a thought to its flight? Of course not. It adjusts its wings and rides on currents of air it cannot see. Be like that eagle. Feel these waves of love that come from our mountain, and let them carry you through your life.�

I slip from the currents sometimes and flap about. But when I go still, when I stop flapping, when I stay patient, those currents always come to find me.