A Place that Embraces You

It's been a difficult week. I've been embroiled in turmoil of all sorts: doors shutting, resources failing, loved ones fighting. Perhaps as a result, this morning in my imagination I find myself in a realm of peace and solitude.

I am sitting in a quiet forest of aspens and lodgepole pine. Near me is a little spring, splashing over rocks on its way to join a creek somewhere nearby. Wind runs its fingers through the tree branches, and they talk to it in some foreign language, maybe elf. I smell pine sap and clean air. I watch the play of light and shadow. I feel the small stones in the humus I am sitting on.

In my soul a terrible sadness and tension unwinds like the spring of an old fashioned watch. The bleakness of knowing and grieving the places I cannot go recedes and calm enters. I relax into the bright stillness of this imaginary day.

When I was in high school I spent real days like this all the time. I'd pack an apple, a canteen, and a tablet of lined paper into a small canvas back pack, and pedal my bike north into Grand Teton National Park. It was 70 miles around the "Loop" as we called it -- out past Moose on the main highway to Moran Junction, then west on the Park road past Signal Mountain, then south past Jenny Lake, joining the main road at Moose again. I'd stop at some out of the way, unmarked spot in the lodgepole forest, hide my bike amid the trees, and walk a little ways until I found a nice place to sit and write a little, undisturbed by a single other soul except the animals who chanced by. Those days are burned into my memory with the deep imprint of that which feels like "home".

So I am home today in my imagination. Rooted in the earth of my own soul, I gaze at the familiar mountains beyond my copse. Adorned in glaciers and the tiny veins of snowmelt, they gaze back placidly. "Here," they say, "are a few million years of history growing into being in front of you." They are still growing, a couple of inches a year, as the block fault that begat them continues to slide -- worn down by winds and snow, they are yet still growing.

My friend Debra jokes when something is taking awhile to change, "it's going slowly -- as in 'slowly the ice age ended'." She says this about our work on the various "isms", like racism and heterosexism.

If there is a conclusion to be drawn, I think I'll let it pass today. It is enough for the moment to be here on native soil in the healing imaginal realm. Perhaps you have a place like this, a place of peace and familiarity, a place that embraces you and grounds you. Perhaps you would be willing to share.