This was one of 15 reflections, by varied members of the Point Reyes community, about our experience of the sacred in the land. A month-long exhibition in October featured the great photos of Todd Pickering juxtaposed with the written word. "This Sacred Land" included essays and poems by a farmer, a surfer, a doctor, a high-schooler, and more. I self-identified as "an improviser."
Sensory one-ness with Earth’s living energies… during glimmering moments at the ocean’s edge or yielding to trees’ green embrace… is how I experience the sacred in the land. In immersive moments outside of time, a person is beckoned home into the more-than-human world.
Earth is an elegant, dynamic system, Gaia. All living beings participate in a looping dance among the atmosphere, sunlight, ocean, soils, and life. Our rocky planet is alive. Earth is essentially an organism, with rock, air, and water her bones and blood, ecosystems and biomes her muscle, her organs. Consciousness pervades our planetary dynamic. Gaia’s mind resonates with the ripples of intelligence emanating through our universe.
Such knowledge-sensations arise when I go walking or swimming in favorite Point Reyes locales. My brain relaxes. My attention turns toward life forms and Earth energies. I enter my church. Notice and revere. Walk, breathe, feel, wonder. Relax thinking-effort in order to learn. Learning is my vocation. I give myself to the great teacher, Gaia. Deep grief may arise for the losses and suffering due to human-caused global change. Joy from a dew-lit cobweb, the matrix of wonder. All insight is sensory: feet bare, cold water on skin, everywhere the breeze, ravens calling, how it feels to move.
Where? For more than half my life—since the time when I chanced to land within greater Point Reyes’ embrace—a foremost guide and friend has been Limantour Beach. A mantra has arisen, “the light at Limantour,” for this locale is rich in shimmer: the interplay of sky (sunlight, clouds, breeze), water (vast reflective bay and nearshore ocean), surf (rhythmic far-traveled energy/glistening sands/shifting tides), and the graceful curve of dunes and headlands.
Embodied experience at Limantour is always new: the place is never the same as before. After a thousand visits there, the coming one will be a surprise, a thrill.
Step out of your parked car. Let the clicks and groans of the engine subside, the sounds of place arise. The air tastes of warm hills, of fecund marsh, of ocean. The music of surf hums and throbs; nearby songbirds chatter. Step by step, you arrive. Admit the blessings of this place into your lungs and blood, your bones. Now, between sky and earth, a hominid is coming home.
Sensory pathways into magic can open up in many a Point Reyes locale. In the pulsing green interplay of sunlight, water and soil in oak grove, alder thicket, conifer forest. In the riot of color, shape and texture revealed by a minus tide on the rocky outer coast. Far from shore in the salty bay at dusk, immersed and weightless, body refreshed, soul revived.
Wherever the more-than-human world becomes a person’s whole sensory experience is where we know Gaia. And pathways into this sacred relationship abound at Point Reyes, a most generous land.
Sensory one-ness with Earth’s living energies… during glimmering moments at the ocean’s edge or yielding to trees’ green embrace… is how I experience the sacred in the land. In immersive moments outside of time, a person is beckoned home into the more-than-human world.
Earth is an elegant, dynamic system, Gaia. All living beings participate in a looping dance among the atmosphere, sunlight, ocean, soils, and life. Our rocky planet is alive. Earth is essentially an organism, with rock, air, and water her bones and blood, ecosystems and biomes her muscle, her organs. Consciousness pervades our planetary dynamic. Gaia’s mind resonates with the ripples of intelligence emanating through our universe.
Such knowledge-sensations arise when I go walking or swimming in favorite Point Reyes locales. My brain relaxes. My attention turns toward life forms and Earth energies. I enter my church. Notice and revere. Walk, breathe, feel, wonder. Relax thinking-effort in order to learn. Learning is my vocation. I give myself to the great teacher, Gaia. Deep grief may arise for the losses and suffering due to human-caused global change. Joy from a dew-lit cobweb, the matrix of wonder. All insight is sensory: feet bare, cold water on skin, everywhere the breeze, ravens calling, how it feels to move.
Where? For more than half my life—since the time when I chanced to land within greater Point Reyes’ embrace—a foremost guide and friend has been Limantour Beach. A mantra has arisen, “the light at Limantour,” for this locale is rich in shimmer: the interplay of sky (sunlight, clouds, breeze), water (vast reflective bay and nearshore ocean), surf (rhythmic far-traveled energy/glistening sands/shifting tides), and the graceful curve of dunes and headlands.
Embodied experience at Limantour is always new: the place is never the same as before. After a thousand visits there, the coming one will be a surprise, a thrill.
Step out of your parked car. Let the clicks and groans of the engine subside, the sounds of place arise. The air tastes of warm hills, of fecund marsh, of ocean. The music of surf hums and throbs; nearby songbirds chatter. Step by step, you arrive. Admit the blessings of this place into your lungs and blood, your bones. Now, between sky and earth, a hominid is coming home.
Sensory pathways into magic can open up in many a Point Reyes locale. In the pulsing green interplay of sunlight, water and soil in oak grove, alder thicket, conifer forest. In the riot of color, shape and texture revealed by a minus tide on the rocky outer coast. Far from shore in the salty bay at dusk, immersed and weightless, body refreshed, soul revived.
Wherever the more-than-human world becomes a person’s whole sensory experience is where we know Gaia. And pathways into this sacred relationship abound at Point Reyes, a most generous land.