merge with sunlight and air

My friend Ferris, a Nebraska native, has been urging me to read works by Loren Eiseley, a Lincoln born scientist and writer. He lent me a book containing an excerpt from Eiseley's The Immense Journey, titled "The Flow of the River." In this piece, Eiseley describes wading into the Platte river and floating, becoming the water, he writes, "It was then that I felt the cold needles of the alpine springs at my finger tips, and the warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward." Love it.

And these few sentences hit me in the stomach --

"Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort."