A Sacred Place

There are places that are sacred and you know it without anyone telling you. I went to such a place today, and it doesn’t matter where it was, you need only know that it was a place of power and a place of peace, a place to pause and be still, a place for whatever it is that you call prayer. I didn’t know we were going there. It’s just where we ended up, and I was empty-handed and unfettered, no backpack, no water, no camera, no plan. It was all just an impulse, and there was something absurd and child-like about it, but maybe some good radar led us there, called us there.

I didn’t say it out loud, but October 12th is a significant date in my personal history. On this day exactly thirty years ago, my father died, and so my life divided into the years before that date and the years after.

But life continued and the world kept changing.

Yesterday I rode my bicycle in the howling wind, buffeted about like a tiny craft on a roiling sea, at one point almost tipping over. I coasted beneath a leafy arc of eucalyptus trees that lined the road on either side, heard their creaking and clapping and the swoosh of a thousand whispers, then I burst out into the open road again. I saw monarch butterflies, and three tiny deer, and the hard-edged blues of the ocean and the sky, and the islands etched on the horizon. 

I felt tired and fragile.

It’s hard not to feel that way lately.We’re all being pummeled and tossed about by forces we seem unable to control. But the things that will not let us down are the things that always mattered: the love of friends and family, the circle of community, a handful of earth, a sense of enough. Welcome to the good old days.

We stood today at the sacred place and saw what others before us have seen. We touched rock and felt wind and there was sky all around us.We remembered or we forgot and we yearned or wanted nothing.

I sent my hopes into the universe. And I believe that we are better than we sometimes seem to be.

Now the almost-full Hunter’s Moon has risen above the hills, and the night has a Sunday shine, and a familiar sort of sadness has lodged inside my heart, the sadness that makes everything more precious.