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The woman who ushered me into her Washington apartment was small and lithe, wearing black pants and an orange crocheted sweater. She bustled off to the kitchen, her movements quick and precise as she prepared a cup of herbal tea. Sophy Burnham was nearing seventy, but looked twenty years younger. She wore her dark-blond hair short, simple, and parted on the side, framing a delicate nose and mouth and—clichéd as it sounds—penetrating eyes. She gave me a brief tour of her airy apartment, which occupied one of the city’s oldest and most elegant buildings. The tall windows overlooked a canopy of lush trees on this morning in May. The eclectic artwork on her walls reflected the taste of a woman who has traveled widely: two large oil paintings of saints (booty from the Mexican War); a framed page from a medieval manuscript; an Indian cloth painting of a blue Lord Krishna with his gopis, cows, and peacocks. She cleared a space on a dining room table cluttered with manuscripts and began her story.

Sophy was three or four years old when she first felt some kind of “connection with the universe.”

“It wasn’t that there was something more than this—that there’s a physical world and something else,” she explained. “I had the sense that—like Gerard Manley Hopkins—the physical world was glowing with life. Shining like shook foil. I knew that everything was alive, and that the universe was on my side.”

When she was ten or eleven, she was out riding with her father on their remote Maryland farm.

“My father said to me,‘For some reason the horses are really spooking. ’ Because they were dancing all over the place. And I said, ‘Well, of course they are, they’re feeling all this electricity in the air.’ He said, ‘Oh? Is there electricity in the air?’ And that was the first time that I realized, Oh, not everybody feels this. Isn’t that interesting? I just assumed that everybody was intimately attuned.”

I wrote down her comment and circled it in my notes. As I talked with more people, I would find that mystical adults were once mystical children, as if they were genetically wired for the spiritual.

Over the next thirty years, Sophy would attend Smith College, stray from her Episcopal upbringing, and dabble in atheism. She would marry a NewYork Times reporter and give birth to two girls. In her thirties, the part of her psyche that was a spiritual nomad broke free. She began to seek answers from a Hindu guru and Buddhist meditation. Sophy arrived at age forty-two with teenaged girls, a caring husband, a glittering social life, and a demanding career as a freelance magazine writer.

“I was happy, and yet there was something deeply missing,” Sophy said. “And it was a deep, deep longing that couldn’t be satisfied. I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, Is this all? And then thinking, I have everything. I have a loving husband and a house and children and friends and a career.Why am I yearning for something else? And I didn’t know what I was yearning for.”

She found it on assignment. Town & Country magazine sent her to Costa Rica and Peru to profile the World Wildlife Fund. As an afterthought, she added a side trip to Machu Picchu, the sacred Inca mountain ruins in Peru.

She was sitting in the airport in San José, Costa Rica, when she had a premonition of the mystical experience to come.

“Suddenly, I saw everything shining, shining, and the people were shining,” she recalled.“Everyone was luminous, and it was so profound that I just sat at my table, I just shook, with tears streaming down my face, it was so beautiful. And I thought, Oh well, that’s it.That’s as good as it gets.”

She was wrong. Two days later, when she was climbing the terraces of Machu Picchu with a group of other tourists, “I felt a nagging little chord in me, saying,‘You’ve got to go away, you’ve got to go away. You don’t have much time. Hurry. Hurry.’ ”

She left her companions and scrambled up to the terraces, where she could be alone. She sat down, closed her eyes, and instantly was in