Finding Your Sacred Area in Nature – Part 1

Today, I thought I'd talk about something nearly everyone can do to gain awareness of nature and spirit. It is one of the most intensely informative and spiritually powerful practices I know of, and it is just about as free as anything gets in life. People have called it by many names; I'll refer to it as your "sacred area". Spending many hours in a single location studying its secrets and absorbing details is a fairly common form of practice for naturalists, artists, and nature writers. (My first consistent practice of this type developed as a student of Jon Young's Wilderness Awareness School when he was just getting the program started back in New Jersey.) The practice and tradition comes to us from the Cherokee Nation.

Before getting into the details on why it is sacred and what you are to do there, I'd like to provide an overview of what this sacred area is and what it is not. It is a fairly small place – about a 100 foot diameter circle in a natural place. If possible, it should include a variety of vegetation and landscape features such as a stone wall, a stream, a fallen tree, or transition zone between forest and field perhaps.  Let your heart guide you and don't be in a hurry to get your spot picked out. It might even take you several days of feeling out different spots to find the one that calls to you. Your sacred area should be relatively out of the way so as to minimize your being disturbed by hikers or traffic, etc. You do not need to hide from the world – just be off the beaten path a bit. It is okay if you can see hikers or the trail  – just not too close by.

Once you find an area, pick a center or start place and pace it off to 100 feet. Using a compass may help you to find your cardinal directions (NSEW). From the center, walk 50 paces and mark the spot with a stone or an object you will remember. Walk back to the center/start point, and count another 50 paces to achieve your 100 feet. Now do this again for the other cardinal directions, creating a mental map of where the boundary of the circle is. Take your time to really make this map clear in your mind. More on mapping later. For now, your task is to find a suitable place where you will be in relationship with nature and receive the teachings nature wants to show you.

You will want to visit your circle as often as possible, every day if you could, though most of us can maybe manage a visit once a week. The more frequently you visit, the deeper the impressions of the sacred become. You will only need a minimum of fifteen or twenty minutes there each time. This is to be a fairly focused period of time, and not necessarily a place to sit and worry about your finances or the workplace. Clear your mind of this static for the duration of your visit.

With this simple beginning, you are already accomplishing much! I'll talk about this in a later post. Just observe your experience of this process of finding and mental mapping the boundary – there is magic in it! (Click here for Part 2)

Death du jour

As I drove to work the other day, I passed a dead coyote on the highway – easy to do, since it wasn't moving very fast. (Sorry, I couldn't resist that one.)

It got me thinking about one autumn when I counted 18 Gray Squirrels scattered along a 12 mile route on my way to work. The carnage was impossible to ignore as I had to steer around so many crushed little bodies. Absolutely sickening. I wondered just how many animals die each day on the highways and back roads of this country, so I looked this up and here's what I found (from Wikipedia):

In 1993, 25 schools throughout New England participated in a roadkill study involving 1,923 animal deaths. By category, the fatalities were:

81% mammals
15% birds
3% reptiles and amphibians
1% undiscernible

Extrapolating this data nationwide, Merritt Clifton, editor of Animal People Newspaper estimated that the following animals are being killed by motor vehicles in the United States annually:

41 million squirrels
26 million cats
22 million rats
19 million opossums
15 million raccoons
6 million dogs
350,000 deer

This study may not have considered differences in observability among taxa (i.e. dead raccoons are easier to see than dead frogs), and has not been published in peer-reviewed scientific literature.

This does not mention the billions of insect smeared across windshields or imbedded in radiator grills.

I drove on, feeling sad about this while the announcer on the car radio was taking about the latest suicide bombing in Iraq, then without a moment to let that grim detail sink in, he slides into the update on a recent celebrity scandal. Next comes an annoying commercial for some product that no one really needs, then back to the current fiscal doom story, and finally comes the cheerfully conveyed weather report. Weather reports are inserted to make people forget all the bad things they just heard about, and to encourage more receptive listening so that the advertiser that follows has greater influence on your mind.

Our lives are full of paradox. How do we reconcile such things? I was having a good moment there as I drove to work, a fresh event in the last several months, and it was noticeable. I felt relief. Then I see this beautiful coyote terminated by some motorist (who also likely felt terrible about it), and I felt a twinge of guilt for being happy. I am sad at the loss of this coyote and all road kill I see. But should this sad feeling have more influence on my life than my happiness? You might be thinking I am nuts for even analyzing this experience at all. But since it is there, I must look at it. Sure, I moved on quickly enough, but it stirred my kettle a bit. Every moment of every day there are true horrors and atrocities taking place AND such beautiful miracles and love in the world. To ignore one or the other is somehow inappropriate, though I surely favor the beauty of life. I see what the buddhists mean about attachment to good feelings or bad feelings. Always the pendulum swings while we hang on for our lives!

Winnowing the Seeds from the Chaf

In writing these posts, it is a challenge to keep them from sliding off the edge into self-reflective rubbish. Yet there are important aspects that I try to winnow out for sharing. This can take some time, so for now, here are some photos (an equivalent of 2,000 words).

Adrift on the Seas of Destiny

For too many years have I struggled at expressing myself in a satisfactory manner. Surely, I have some successful bouts of creativity in my life, but always there is the feeling of squeezing these works out of some narrow opening; like shoving a camel through the eye of a needle. I am not sure why it is so hard for me, but I am trying to honor my path and process. I may never fully express myself creatively before I expire, but I must try nonetheless.

Thoughts and feelings thunder and buck like wild horses inside me; the whisper of spirit and the myths of ages past call me to journey into mysterious places in search of some unknown elixir. That is the hero's quest after all – to go beyond the ordinary world and return with healing and wisdom for the people.

Today I have wrestled with blogging technology to get it to do my bidding, yet at the end of the day, I am frustrated because the software is unyielding and has bent my creative desires to its will: the template.

When it comes to manifesting creative projects, I feel like I am lost at sea. No land on the horizon, yet I know that it's out there. I am adrift on the surface of a great underwater world, yet I see nothing of it – it is dark, immense, and frightening. Yet the unconscious deep calls to me relentlessly – a song of mermaids – to lure me down. Metaphorically speaking, that is.  However, twice in my life have I nearly joined them, physically, in the deep, but was spared. Perhaps these near drownings were just a reminder that I live in between two worlds; one of flesh and one of spirit. Best not to confuse the rules of each realm!

Well, enough of this moody soliloquy. Time to sleep and dream and be at peace.

Paradox

Almost two months since arriving at my new post and I have killed more living things in this time period than in the last two decades combined. My job and the nature sanctuary I am managing demands I take up such weapons of destruction as weed whackers, lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, chain saws, and a special mower capable of chewing up and spitting out saplings, vines, ten foot tall reeds and anything else nearby. Meadow voles, mice, woodchucks, and Eastern Cottontail Rabbits flee before the dreadful violence of these weapons of mass destruction I wield. As they run in terror, Red-tailed Hawks occasionally dive to grab some of these hapless mammals and add punctuation to my new role as Death.

Now, on one hand, there will never be a shortage of these invasive plant seeds, berries, rhizomes, and vines. In fact, the invasive plants here have already won the battle and now "own" most of the land of this sanctuary. Yet, despite the population and reproductive capabilities of these plants, I am still killing individual life forms in the name of caretaking and stewardship and natural resource management. It's my job.

I have to pick my vegetative battles and let the rest alone to choke itself and cast billions of seeds this way and that. Soon I will be desensitized to this act of dealing death. It must happen. . . just as soldiers are trained to face enemies in battlefield condtions and kill them, even though the enemy belongs to their own species.

And in all its madness, I am trying to find a vision for the land through the lens of my job as a naturalist, educator, and habitat manager. How to be at peace with the paradox of life: that creation and destruction walk hand in hand, bound together, eternally trying to undo what the other has wrought. In the final analysis, they become each other. And I too cannot escape the paradox:  of loving nature, wanting to protect and save the land for diversity and the health of the life web it is apart of; and dealing death to countless living organisms in the process. In this I am cheerless, and my soul outraged to have been sent to this frontier to "manage the land and natural resources". I am privately ashamed to feel a certain satisfaction as I look at the improvements I've made to the appearance of things.

With any luck, I'll eventually lighten up about my situation and be able to post "happy" and "uplifting" nature journal entries and observations.