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Wednesday 6.8.05: More Magic Places
Tuesday's question prompted some interesting thoughts, published yesterday. Here are few more:
From KBP:
... First glance of the Irish landscape through
the plane window as we were descending and then walking through the
streets of Ireland on our first trip. I couldn't believe I was really
there.
... Also, walking through the Japanese Garden at
Missouri Botanical Park in the Spring when all the flowers are blooming.
I should recapture that more often.
From EPS:
... The image that first and persistently pops into mind is sitting in the dark, while the world is asleep, rocking and feeding my baby. That led to sitting outside while the rest of the world seems asleep. No matter how tired I am, I feel an energy there. Those are my alone magical places.
From Murrah, whose experience takes us from the intimate to the mystical:
In 1968 I was working at an Off-Broadway theater in San Francisco and got burnt out by the North Beach scene and laid claim to a 10-acre gold mining claim in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was on the Middle Fork of the Yuba River and a two-days hike, from a WPA bridge over the river, up the river into the mountains along a pack mule...
At my claim, the old miners had dammed up the river with huge boulders to divert the water through a square tunnel, about 20 feet long, they had carved through a single boulder. In the bottom of the tunnel, the floor was flat with a channel, about 14" wide and 6" deep, that they had used to wash gold.
Where they had dammed up the river, there was a pool of water that was crystal clear, but so deep that I could not reach the bottom because of the pressure on my ears. But, the water was so clear, it seemed like you could just reach in and pick up any rock you wanted off the bottom.
The dam was built so the water flowed through the tunnel in the boulder and through a spillway on the opposite side of the river. Now, when I had the claim, the river had cut into the bank on the side opposite the tunnel. That is, the river had carved out the bank and created a sandy beach under a deep cut in the cliff face.
I used to lie naked on the surface of the pool, face down wearing a snorkel mask and spend hours watching life in the pool, and then spend more hours on my back watching the life in the sky.
This is the place where I met my spirit guide, a large brown female bear, who came to me on the beach under the cliff, and this is where I go to meet her when I need to understand certain types of things.
She has also shown me another magic place high up in the mountains, a glade right at tree line, and this is where I go to meet two other guides, a female and male wolf pair who take me on other types of journeys.
Clearly Murrah was able to push to envelope -- extreme isolation, hours of quiet, releasing all the locks against "otherness." I think everyone who has written something for this exercise has had some inkling of another dimension, something we brush up against from time to time but don't have the patience or motivation to pursue. A place where there might be fairies. For us moderns, who have dispensed with folkways for paved streets and central heating, I don't think there are any short-cuts back.
I want to hear from others!
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