Rebecca Solnit and the Power of Naming

"The universe isn't made of atoms, it's made of stories"

Muriel Rukeyser

We're incubating the future with the stories we tell.   So what are the stories, the mythos, that we individually and collectively create our societies with?   How much power does "story" really have?

I'm taking the liberty (once more)  of copying from the wonderful journal "Brain Pickings" by  Maria Popova.  Her perceptive review of a recent book by Rebecca Solnit.  I'm a great fan of both       and Rebecca Solnit.   Beyond the power of naming is also the important task of mythmaking for our time, and artists and writers are the storytellers who speak to that task, whether they realize it or not.  

Rebecca Solnit on Rewriting the World’s Broken Stories and the Paradigm-Shifting Power of Calling Things by Their True Names

“Finding the words is another step in learning to see,”bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in reflecting on what her Native American tradition and her training as a scientist taught her about how naming confers dignity upon life. If to name is to see and reveal — to remove the veil of blindness, willful or manipulated, and expose things as they really are — then it is in turn another step in remaking the world, another form of resistance to the damaging dominant narratives that go unquestioned. Walt Whitman knew this when he contemplated our greatest civic might: “I can conceive of no better service… than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.”

A century and a half after Whitman, Rebecca Solnit — one of our own era’s boldest public defenders of democracy, and one of the most poetic — explores this crucial causal link between the stories we tell and the world we build in Call Them by Their True Names (public library) — a collection of her essays at the nexus of politics, philosophy, and the selective record of personal and political choices we call history. Composed in response to more than a decade’s worth of cultural crises and triumphs, the pieces in the book furnish an extraordinarily lucid yet hopeful lens on the present and a boldly uncynical telescopic perspective on the future.

Rebecca Solnit (Photograph: Sallie Dean Shatz)

Solnit writes in the preface:

One of the folktale archetypes, according to the Arne-Thompson classification of these stories, tells of how “a mysterious or threatening helper is defeated when the hero or heroine discovers his name.” In the deep past, people knew names had power. Some still do. Calling things by their true names cuts through the lies that excuse, buffer, muddle, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness. It’s not all there is to changing the world, but it’s a key step.

When the subject is grim, I think of the act of naming as diagnosis. Though not all diagnosed diseases are curable, once you know what you’re facing, you’re far better equipped to know what you can do about it. Research, support, and effective treatment, as well as possibly redefining the disease and what it means, can proceed from this first step. Once you name a disorder, you may be able to connect to the community afflicted with it, or build one. And sometimes what’s diagnosed can be cured.

That, indeed, is what the philosopher and Trappist monk Thomas Merton celebrated in his beautiful fan letter to Rachel Carson after she catalyzed the modern environmental movement by speaking inconvenient truth to power in exposing the truth about pesticides, marketed at the time as harmless helpers to humanity — an act Merton considered “contributing a most valuable and essential piece of evidence for the diagnosis of the ills of our civilization.” Such naming of wrongs, betrayals, and corruptions unweaves the very fabric of the status quo. It is, Solnit argues, “the first step in the process of liberation” and often leads to shifts in the power system itself. In the age of “alternative facts,” when language is used as a weapon of oppression and manipulation, her words reverberate with the irrepressible, unsilenceable urgency of truth:

To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or corrupt — or important or possible — and key to the work of changing the world is changing the story.

More than a century after Nietzsche contemplated truth, lies, and the power of language to both conceal and reveal reality, Solnit writes:

There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that the white kids are “hanging out” but the Black kids are “loitering” or “lurking.” Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.

What, then, can we do as namers and storytellers, as part of the truth-telling brigade that stands as warden of reality? Solnit offers:

Precision, accuracy, and clarity matter, as gestures of respect toward those to whom you speak; toward the subject, whether it’s an individual or the earth itself; and toward the historical record. It’s also a kind of self-respect… The search for meaning is in how you live your life but also in how you describe it and what else is around you.

The precision and respect of our words add up to the precision and respect of our stories — something Virginia Woolf implicitly recognized when she asserted that “words belong to each other” in the only surviving recording of her voice. When James Baldwin insisted that “we made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over,” he did so with an eye to storytelling as worldbuilding. Solnit addresses this — the remaking of stories as a remodeling of the world — in another piece in the book, exploring the responsibility of those tasked with telling the world’s truths: the writers, journalists, and storytellers whose words shape our understanding of reality. She writes:

Stories surround us like air; we breathe them in, we breathe them out. The art of being fully conscious in personal life means seeing the stories and becoming their teller, rather than letting them be the unseen forces that tell you what to do. Being a public storyteller requires the same skills with larger consequences and responsibilities, because your story becomes part of that water, undermining or reinforcing the existing stories. Your job is to report on the story on the surface, the contained story, the one that happened yesterday. It’s also to see and sometimes to break open or break apart the ambient stories, the stories that are already written, and to understand the relationship between the two.

In a testament to the crucial importance — and difficulty — of breaking out of our presentism bias and taking a telescopic perspective of the past, she adds:

There are stories beneath the stories and around the stories. The recent event on the surface is often merely the hood ornament on the mighty social engine that is a story driving the culture. We call those “dominant narratives” or “paradigms” or “memes” or “metaphors we live by” or “frameworks.” However we describe them, they are immensely powerful forces. And the dominant culture mostly goes about reinforcing the stories that are the pillars propping it up and that, too often, are also the bars of someone else’s cage. They are too often stories that should be broken, or are already broken and ruined and ruinous and way past their expiration date. They sit atop mountains of unexamined assumptions.

[…]

Part of the job of a great storyteller is to examine the stories that underlie the story you’re assigned, maybe to make them visible, and sometimes to break us free of them. Break the story. Breaking is a creative act as much as making, in this kind of writing.

In a sense, what Solnit is advocating for is the opposite of revisionist history — the opposite of the convenient erasure of wrongdoings and betrayals over which the lulling stories of the status quo are written. I think of it as revisionist future — the act of courage and creativity required for changing the terrain of reality by imagining alternative landscapes and new pathways of possibility. “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice,” Ursula K. Le Guin observed in her poignant reflection on how imaginative storytelling expands the scope of the possible. “We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.”

Illustration of the Trojan horse from Alice and Martin Provensen’s vintage adaptation of Homer for young readers

But the most powerful and transformative imagination, Solnit reminds us, is the informed imagination:

The writer’s job is not to look through the window someone else built, but to step outside, to question the framework, or to dismantle the house and free what’s inside, all in service of making visible what was locked out of the view. News journalism focuses on what changed yesterday rather than asking what are the underlying forces and who are the unseen beneficiaries of this moment’s status quo… This is why you need to know your history, even if you’re a journalist rather than a historian. You need to know the patterns to see how people are fitting the jumble of facts into what they already have: selecting, misreading, distorting, excluding, embroidering, distributing empathy here but not there, remembering this echo or forgetting that precedent.

Some of the stories we need to break are not exceptional events, they’re the ugly wallpaper of our everyday lives. For example, there’s a widespread belief that women lie about being raped, not a few women, not an anomalous woman, but women in general. This framework comes from the assumption that reliability and credibility are as natural to men as mendacity and vindictiveness are to women. In other words, feminists just made it all up, because otherwise we’d have to question a really big story whose nickname is patriarchy. But the data confirms that people who come forward about being raped are, overall, telling the truth (and that rapists tend to lie, a lot). Many people have gotten on board with the data, many have not, and so behind every report on a sexual assault is a battle over the terms in which we tell, in what we believe about gender and violence.

She considers the only antidote to these age-old stories:

Journalists are the story-breakers whose work often changes the belief systems that then drive legislative and institutional change. It’s powerful, honorable, profoundly necessary work when it’s done with passion and independence and guts.

Building on her previous history-informed insistence that “the grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don’t know yet whether they will have any effect,” she highlights our warped weighing of which stories matter. Exactly half a century after Hannah Arendt — another of our civilization’s great political minds — considered the power of outsiderdom and asserted that “we humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human,” Solnit writes:

We tend to treat people on the fringe as ideologues and those in the center as neutral, as though the decision not to own a car is political and the decision to own one is not, as though to support a war is neutral and to oppose it is not. There is no apolitical, no sidelines, no neutral ground; we’re all engaged.

[…]

I think of the mainstream media as having not so much a rightwing or leftwing bias but a status quo bias, a tendency to believe people in authority, to trust institutions and corporations and the rich and powerful and pretty much any self-satisfied white man in a suit; to let people who have been proven to tell lies tell more lies that get reported without questioning; to move forward on cultural assumptions that are readily disproven; and to devalue nearly all outsiders, whether they’re discredited or mocked or just ignored.

Solnit turns to the largest-scale cultural assumption, erected by our civilization’s most unforgiving institutional, corporate, and political power structures — the selfsame assumption Carson had begun to dismantle half a century earlier — from which arises our largest-scale truth-telling responsibility:

For journalists and for human beings generally, the elephant in the room has been there for a long time. It’s not even the elephant: the elephant in the room is the room itself, the biosphere in which all life currently known to exist in the universe is enclosed, and on which it all depends, the biosphere now devastated by climate change, with far more change to come. The scale is not like anything human beings have faced and journalists have reported on, except perhaps the threat of all-out nuclear war — and that was something that might happen, not something that is happening. Climate change is here, and it is changing everything. It is bigger than anything else, because it is everything, for the imaginable future.

[…]

Future generations are going to curse most of us for distracting ourselves with trivialities as the planet burned. Journalists are in a pivotal place when it comes to the possibilities and the responsibilities in this crisis. We, the makers and breakers of stories, are tremendously powerful.

So please, break the story.

Complement this particular portion of Call Them by Their True Names — a super read in its rousing and revelatory totality — with Iris Murdoch on why storytelling is essential for democracy, Ursula K. Le Guin on the power of language to transform and redeem, and Susan Sontag on storytelling and what it means to be a decent human being, then revisit Solnit on breaking silence, living with intelligent hope in dispiriting times, catastrophe as a catalyst for human goodness, the rewards of walking, how maps can oppress and liberate, and why we read.

Butterflies in my Garden........

Quite the gathering of butterflies in my garden!  

James Swan on the Presence of Place

Avebury

“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

― Wendell Berry

I've been thinking about what my life long passions are of late, and what course I  might set for myself as an artist now.  I find that what I keep coming back to is that deep sense of the living Earth, the sense of presence I have always felt when in nature, or in the garden.  The Great Conversation.   In November I'm going to England, near Avebury, to attend a Conference called "Dreaming the Land:  Working with the Consciousness of Nature" .  I want to walk among the Stones of Avebury, re-visit the White Spring and Red Springs of Glastonbury, renew my aquaintance.  And talk with as many people as I can about what the living Earth means to them.  I hope to bring that inspiration home, and speak, as an artist, about it.  Gathering voices to help me understand how the Earth speaks to us, and how people have spoken to the Earth in the past.  

I think about a conversation I had once in a coffee shop in Brooklyn, N.Y,, with an artist named Caroline Beasley Baker.   She spoke about the Dreaming Earth:

"I once had a wonderful dream. I dreamed I was riding across the Australian desert at night. I was on a bus, and everyone was asleep. I looked out, across the dark, and saw, rising up out of the desert floor, these incredibly beautiful murals, in huge caverns lit by firelight. I knew they had been made by some consciousness predating humanity, that they had been here for millennia. They had never been seen in the world before, and were now rising up to the surface of the Earth.  Those paintings were more glorious than anything I've ever seen in my life! At the end of the dream, a voice said to me, "Caroline, that's the Earth dreaming".  The Aborigines believe that everything rises from the Earth, everything rests in the Earth and emerges when its time. That's what my dream was about: the Earth dreaming and awakening."1.

I felt like sharing here an article here by James Swan, who has written extensively about the  intelligence of the land, and has been a continual inspiration to me over the years.   Dr. Swan has published numerous books about the Spirit of Place.   His book "The Power of Place" draws on  26 presentations drawn from the five year Spirit of Place symposium  held in the US and Japan between 1988 and 1993.  I wish the symposium was still happening, because I believe it is vitally important that we learn again how to have communion with the Earth again.  How to regain our experience of being a part of the Conversation.    

The Spirit of Place Symposiums: 
 Seeking The Modern Relevance of Ancient Wisdom

By James A. Swan, Ph.D
________________________________________
"Modern man will never find peace until he comes
into harmony with the place where he lives." 

Carl Jung (Pantheon, 1964)
________________________________________

Introduction

The ancient Greeks spoke of the "genus loci," or spirit of a place. They sited a shrine to honor the Earth Goddess Gaia at Delphi in Greece because the unique personality or spirit of that place was divined to be especially suited to Gaia residing there. Understanding the forces that drew the early Greeks to reach that decision may well be a concept that is at the very root of developing sustainable human societies on earth and creating tourism programs that maximize the unique values of each destination.

Like trees, the human spirit needs roots, and a primary root of the psyche is in the land. Psychiatrist Carl Jung was an explorer of those deeper regions of the mind, the unconscious, where symbols and primal energies originate. Jung declared there were two types of unconscious: personal, which is unique to each person, and collective, which is shared by all humans, and seems to have loose boundaries with other objects and creatures (Dell, 1968). In our sleep, the unconscious comes to the forefront, and Jung observed that people tended to have dreams of a similar archetypal nature when sleeping at certain places. Jung called such place perception "psychic localization," and asserted that it was an important part of human nature.

East Indian scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy agreed with Jung about the unique association between place and consciousness and noted that myths were frequently linked to certain places. He coined the phrase "land-nam," a term derived from the Icelandic tradition of claiming ownership of a place through weaving together a mythic metaphor of plants, animals and geography of a place into a unique mythic story (Luzac, 1935).

The spirit of place plays a strong role in traditional societies, where it is commonly held that each place has a personality and some places are associated with spiritual sentiments. Ancient wisdom deserves respect and preservation, but what additional value may such concepts as the spirit of place have for modern society?

The Spirit of Place Symposiums

From 1988 to 1993 my wife Roberta and I produced a five-year series of annual symposiums -- The Spirit of Place: The Modern Relevance of An Ancient Concept -- seeking to help restore the wisdom of the past about the significance of place and explore its meaning to modern times.

Each symposium was begun with an open call for papers, inviting people from all disciplines and cultural heritage backgrounds to share in a common quest for understanding the subtle power of place. Nearly 300 speakers participated in the programs, four of which were held in the United States -- University of California at Davis, Grace Cathedral, Mesa Verde National Park, and at the San Rafael, CA, Marin Civic Center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright -- and one was held in Sendai, Japan. Speakers represented disciplines as diverse as aerospace engineering, biophysics, psychology, architecture, biology, law, history, anthropology, music, dance and art. Members of 20 different American Indian tribes participated with speeches, music singing and dancing, along with others from Eskimo, African, Polynesian, and Oriental ethnic backgrounds. The rule that was used to organize such a diverse group was that they had to participate as peers, equal experts in whatever their profession. 

Thus panels blending a salmon fisherman with a physicist and an aerospace engineer with priest and a farmer became a common search for truth where many new alliances were forged. At each program, we concluded with a performance inspired by special places. Artists who performed included flutists Paul Horn and R. Carlos Nakai, dancer-choreographer Anna Halpern, keyboard artist Steven Halpern, Japanese recording artist Jun Hirose, and the rock-fusion band Earth Spirit.

Lessons of The Spirit of Place

In producing these programs our principle goal was to explore the modern validity of this ancient concept. We did not to try to start a spirit of place movement. Rather, we hope that what has taken place will set the stage for others to conduct programs that will advance our understanding of the power of places everywhere.  In these five programs, listening to nearly 300 speakers, formally and informally, we heard common themes emerge. The following are some of these shared areas of agreement:

1)Among indigenous cultures all around the world, the belief in the existence of special places of power and spirit seems universal. It is commonly believed that some places have spiritual powers, and these places are normally seen as cornerstones of traditional cultural belief systems. Modern society has often not paid much attention to sacred places, which is a source of great concern to traditional cultures. Another concern is that modern cultures tend to see places as only having value to the past or to other cultures, rather than to society in general.

2) At each of the five Spirit of Place symposiums researchers and designers from many disciplines agreed that gaining a sense of place is a very important part of their work, yet there is very little research on this topic or professional organizations seriously investigating the topic. Modern people are often aware of the unique spirit of a place, but do not have a vocabulary to express their feelings, except through art.

3) A characteristic style of art seems to arise from a geographic region; it is a voice that speaks to us through indigenous art of the spirit of that place. Drawings, paintings, carving, sculpture, stories, songs, poetry and dances, are all fed by the spirit of a place. The artist's mind is not so encumbered by the constraints of intellectual reasoning and so it becomes a more clear channel for the unconscious to expressed. He or she gives voice and form to the spirit of the land.

4)The experience of place is multi-faceted and influenced by culture, personal uniqueness and modality of awareness. There may be many more sensory processes by which we perceive the earth and nature than modern science and psychology are willing to admit. Ancient traditions such as Chinese Feng Shui assert that we have at least 100 senses to perceive place. The needs of modern society for ecologically conscious design suggests that in the training of designers we should seek to cultivate the inner designer as well as training professional skills.

5) Each place has a unique quality which in turn influences what can best be done there.
The built environment can serve as an amplifier of the powers of a place, or it can negate the influence of locality, yielding what Frank Lloyd Wright called "cash and carry architecture." Architecture and design that honors the spirit of place and gives it meaning and form expresses beauty and nourishes health and creativity. Architecture is ultimately a ritual in structural materials.

6)The act of making a pilgrimage to special places is among the oldest acts of human respect for nature and spirit, and one of the least understood and appreciated by modern society, despite the facts that we undertake pilgrimages by the millions each year. Psychology needs to better understand the value of pilgrimage to human life as it may be one of the most important ways that we can discover our meaning, find health, and be inspired, as well as build reverence for nature.

7)The lack of feeling connected to a place, especially a place where one lives and works, can be an important source of mental and physical stress. People need to feel peaceful where they are, and maintain a psychic connection with a place of natural beauty if they do not reside in one. Actor James Earl Jones, who gained his awareness of the power of place by growing up on a dirt farm in northern Michigan has observed: "I have always thought it quite wonderful and necessary to keep connected to nature, to a place in the country landscape where one can rest and muse and listen" (Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1993).

8) Geomancy is the spiritual parent of modern design. Many ancient geomancies understand the importance of the relationship between place and personal experience and take elaborate measures to insure people are harmonized with the spirit of a place. When principles of design from Feng Shui and other geomancies are applied to modern buildings and communities, positive results occur. We need to set aside our limiting beliefs and appreciate the power of such approaches in the same fashion that western science has acknowledged the healing values of acupuncture, even though modern science cannot prove the existence of the life force chi and other geomantic concepts.

9)Modern science is beginning to measure the subtle properties of place. We now know that air ions, electrical and electromagnetic fields do influence health and well-being. More research needs to be devoted to the study of subtle environmental fields. Documenting the existence and value of these fields, may well lead to a whole new art and science of design with modern science and ancient wisdom working together.

10) In a Spirit of Place keynote, psychologist Robert Sommer observed that people can become "a voice" for the spirit of that region as much as for a human community or a relationship. John Muir, for example, seemed to embody the spirit of Yosemite Valley. The Lakota holy man Black Elk was a voice for the Black Hills of South Dakota. Rachel Carson was inspired by Cape Cod to write about "the sense of wonder" in nature as well as the dangers of pesticides to ecological balance. Becoming a voice for the land creates a "psychic anchor" that seems to be important to mental health.

11) The spirit of place concept is less understood by modern society, and one result is that conflicts about the value of place can and do arise between traditional and modern cultures.It is easy to flame the fires of conflict in such situations, creating enemies to raise funds to wage wars that should never have to exist. This kind of self-righteous scapegoating is as exploitive as developers who wish to commercialize sacred places for the sake of pure profit. The more difficult task is to build bridges of respect and cooperation between traditional and modern cultures, but it is the only path that can lead us to greater harmony and understanding.

12) We need new laws and land-use categories that facilitate honoring the power of place, including recognition of sacred places. Creating the public policies that yield such laws will require cross-cultural communication, cooperation and understanding unprecedented in modern society.

Conclusion

The consensus among participants in the Spirit of Place Symposiums is that we must rediscover the wisdom about the power of place and turn it into practical concepts that will guide modern people to live in harmony with the earth, as well as show respect for ancient traditions. Learning to plan and design with respect for the unique spirit of each place is a touchstone of responsible eco-tourism that respects traditional cultures and provides important benefits to modern culture as well.

________________________________________

This paper is drawn from Dialogues With The Living Earth  by James and Roberta Swan (1996)

Bibliography

Coomaraswamy, Ananda. 1935 
Jones, James Earl. 1993 Voices and Silences. New York, NY: Chas. Scribner's Sons, p.358.
Jung, Carl 1964 Civilization In Transition: Vol. 10 Collective Works of Carl Jung New York, NY: Pantheon.
Jung, Carl 1968 Man and His Symbols New York, NY: Dell.
Lawrence, D.H. 1923 Studies In Classical American Literature. New York, NY: Thomas Seltzer and Sons, p.8-9.
Swan, James 1990 Sacred Places: How The Living Earth Seeks Our Friendship Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Company.
Swan, James ed. 1991 The Power of Place Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.
Swan, James and Swan, Roberta 1996 Dialogues With The Living Earth Wheaton, IL: Quest.
     

Sacred Places and Pilgrimage

At the end of November I'll be going to southern England, near Avebury, to attend the Gatekeeper Trust Annual Conference  ‘DREAMING the LAND’:  Working with the Consciousness of Nature,  24 - 25 November 2018.  I'll then be spending some time in Salisbury, and in Glastonbury, where I will be giving a talk about the Masks of the Goddess Project, sponsored by the Temple of the Goddess of Glastonbury.

I spent time in southern England in 2011 when I attended the Goddess Conference, an event that was truly transformative for me.    


http://gatekeeper.org.uk/events/annual-conference-2018

NUMINA:  Sacred Places and Pilgrimage

"To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension.  In traditional Bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced:  every place had its legend and its own identity....what endured was the mythic landscape."

    R.F. Foster

The Romans believed that special places were inhabited by intelligences they called Numina, the "genius loci" of a particular place.   I believe many mythologies are rooted in actual experiences of "spirit of place", the "living landscape", a conversation within which we also participate.  

Myth is, and always has been, a way for human beings to become intimate and conversant with what is vast, deep, and ultimately mysterious. Our experience changes when Place becomes "you" or "Thou" instead of "it".   There are many disciplines now writing about the importance of place, asking, in essence, “how can we renew our ancient conversation with the Earth"?  As pagans I believe we are uniquely able to answer that question, and lead the way into re-mything our culture.  In the past, "Nature" was not just a "backdrop" or a "resource"...........nature was a relationship within which cultures were profoundly embedded.  Whether we speak of the aborigines of Australia, Celtic fey folk, or the agrarian roots of Rome, the landscape was spiritually personified.  Every valley, orchard, healing spring or womb-like cave had its unique quality and force - its Numina.   Cooperation and respect for the Numina was essential for well-being.  And some places were places of special power, places of pilgrimage.

With the evolution of monotheism and religions that increasingly removed divinity from Nature and the body, and in the past century, the rise of industrialization, we have looked at the world primarily from a "users" point of view.  This  screen tends to frame the world as an object.  Yet every culture, including ours, has insisted throughout its pre-industrial stages that the world is alive,  and responsive to what human beings do upon it.   From katchinas to the Orisha, naiads to dryads, the Australian Dream Time to Alchemy's Anima Mundi,  every local myth reflects what the Greeks and Romans knew as the resident “spirit of place”, the Genious Loci.

Contemporary Gaia Theory proposes that the Earth is a living, self-regulating organism, responsive and evolving.  If one is sympathetic to Gaia Theory, it follows that everything is responsive and conversant in some way, visible and invisible.     Sacred places may be places where the potential for revelation, healing, or transpersonal experience is especially potent.  Ancient Greeks built their Oracle at Delphi for this reason, and certainly early Christians knew this when they built churches on existing pagan sites.  There is a geo-magnetic, terrestrial energy concentrated at certain places on our planet that throughout the millennia catalyzes spiritual insight, healing, visionary experience, even prophecy.  Before they became contained and mythologized by  religions or marked by prehistoric monuments, these sites were intrinsically places of numinous power and presence in their own right.  They radiate their powers to all who visit, and ultimately, no practice of a particular religion or belief system is needed for them to have a transformative effect, although human architecture and the accumulation of human psychic energy and visitation may amplify this effect.  

Roman philosopher Plinius Caecilius commented that:

  "If you have come upon a grove that is thick with ancient trees which rise far above their usual height and block the view of the sky with their cover of intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest and the seclusion of the place and the wonder of the unbroken shade in the midst of open space will create in you a feeling of a divine presence, a Numina."

Many years ago I lived in Vermont, and one fall morning I stumbled down to the Inn for a cup of coffee to discover a group of people about to visit one of Vermont's mysterious stone cairns on Putney Mountain.  Among the researchers was Sig Lonegren, a well known dowser and researcher of earth mysteries.  Before I had my second cup of coffee I found myself on the bus, and then at a chamber constructed of huge stones, hidden among brilliant foliage, with an entrance way perfectly framing the Summer Solstice.  No one knows who built these structures, which occur by the hundreds up and down the Connecticut River, but approaching the site I felt such a rush of vitality it took my breath away.  I was stunned when Sig placed divining rods in my hands, and I watched them open as we traced the ley lines that ran into this site.   Standing on the top of the somewhat submerged chamber, my divining rod "helicoptered", letting me know that this was the crossing of two leys, a potent place. 

Months later 13 friends gathered in the dark to sit in that chamber and watch the sun rise through its entrance way.  We were not a coven, I had not even heard of such a thing, but we all felt the power of the deep, vibrant energy there, and awe as the sun rose illuminating the chamber.   None of us knew what to do, so we held hands and chanted Aum.  We were all as high as a kite when we left, and this was the beginning of a life long journey for me, a journey that led me here. 

Earth mysteries researchers like John Steele and Paul Deveraux in their book EARTHMIND have written that we suffer from "geomantic amnesia".  We have forgotten how to listen to the Earth, to engage in "geomantic reciprocity", instinctively, mythically, and practically, to our great loss and endangerment. 

We disregard or destroy for short term economic gain places of power, and conversely, build homes, even hospitals, on places that are geomagnetic ally toxic.  The ancient Greeks built their shrine for Gaia at Delphi because the unique personality of that place was divined to be especially suited to Gaia residing there. They also sited their healing Dream Temples according to the auspiciousness of place.  Honoring what inspired the early Greeks to decide on a particular place may be important not only to pilgrims, but to something at the base of building future sustainable human societies.

The act of making a pilgrimage is among the oldest human endeavors. Recent discoveries at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey include a landscape of monolithic  temples that peoples journeyed to 12,000 years ago.    The Eleusinian Mysteries  combined spirit of place and mythic enactment to transform pilgrims, and enact the death/rebirth cycle of nature, for almost 2,500 years.  I believe there are both leylines and mythic “songlines" that trace ancient pilgrimages to the Black Madonnas of Europe (which are still going on).One of the most famous is the "Camino" which concludes at the Cathedral of Santiago at Compostella.  Some believe the earliest Camino was to the “Black Madonna of Compostella", a very ancient effigy. Compostella comes from the same root word as "compost",  the fertile soil created from rotting organic matter, the "dark matter"  to which everything living returns, and is continually resurrected by the processes of nature into new life, new form.  Pilgrims finally arriving in  Compostella after their long journey were being 'composted' in a sense.  Emerging from the  dark confines of the cathedral they were ready to return home with their spirits reborn. 

In 2011 I visited the ancient sacred springs of Glastonbury, the Chalice Well and the White Spring as well as participating in the Goddess Conference there.   Making this intentional Pilgrimage was life changing, and I had a profound, personal sense of the "Spirit of Place", what some call the "Lady of Avalon".  Pilgrimage opens one to blessing, vision, and reverence.  

As a dowser myself, I've experienced shifts in energy - which means also shifts in  consciousness -many times when visiting areas that are geomantically potent, be it the henge of Avebury,  or the labyrinth at Unity Church in Tucson, Glastonbury, or even a crop circle in Wiltshire.  Freddy Silva is an Englishman who has spent many years researching authentic Crop Circles. He has found that they have unique phenomena, including magnetic and energetic properties, which have been documented to alter consciousness and affect the health of some individuals.  The vast majority of the documented authentic crop circles have occurred near prehistoric standing stones, Silbury Hill, and other places of geomantic potency near by.  Silva believes they are not only communicating through the universal language of symbol and Mandela but they are also, speaking in terms of subtle energies, changing the land and underground water tables  in some way - perhaps, an infusion, a "pollination".  He calls them "Temporary Temples".

Sacred Sites are able to raise energy because they are intrinsically geomantically potent, and they also become potent because of human interaction with the innate intelligence of place.  My teacher, spiritual dowser Sig Lonegren, has spent many years exploring sacred places, and commented that possibly, as human culture and language became increasingly complex, we began to lose mediumistic consciousness, a daily, conversational Gnosis with the "subtle realms". 

 With the gradual ascendancy of left-brained reasoning he suggests the ancients were concerned with how to continue contact with the gods, the ancestors, the numina of the land.  According to Sig, Stonehenge may represent a "last ditch effort" to keep in touch with the spirit world with communal experience.   As the rift between personal gnosis and spiritual contact deepened with the development of patriarchal institutions, tribal and individual Gnosis was replaced by complex religious institutions that rendered spiritual authority to priests who were viewed as the sole representatives of the Gods or God.  

Perhaps this capacity is returning to us now, a new evolutionary balance. As crisis engulfs us, we need, once again, to re-member how to “speak to the Earth", to make pilgrimage to the Source, by whatever name. 

 References:

***Sig Lonegren:

http://www.sacredsites.co.uk  ©1998

http//:www.geomancy.org
http//:www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk

*** EARTHMIND: Communicating With the Living World of Gaia, by John Steele, Paul Deveraux, and David Kubrin (1989) 

***Freddy Silva:  http://www.invisibletemple.com/

Creativity and Divinity........Reflections

One of the things I have been thinking about is what kind of world would it be if our value system revolved around Creativity and Co-operation, instead of power, money, and dominance.  What kind of world..............Well, a world that could endure and be sustainable, among other things.  A world children could grow to their potential in.  A world where the resources of the collective and the planet went to something other than war and violence.  

Creativity.  Personally, my notion of a Deity, or Deities, is that She is an artist.  And a Mother.  That is a very different way of looking at the Divine from a great deal of what I see often.    We all have instrinsic expressive and communicative gifts in life, which I think come down to the same thing:    One is the eternal, seamless creative and receptive source, the other the mortal (and hence not immortal)  means.  When we are creating, the Divine expresses through each of us, whether we're making a mathematical theorem or a new recipe for lemon cake.  We're engaged in the Long Dance.

How can anyone look at an orchid, shamelessly pretending, in the hope of being pollinated, that it is a bevy of  magenta tipped butterflies in flight......without seeing the Goddess/God  at Her easel?  Without appreciating, indeed being in awe, of  the gorgeous humor, and creative intelligence, behind all things visible?  How miraculous is a spider in its perfect web?  The extraordinary way in which a sage plant knows exactly when to send up purple flowers, along with every other sage plant in the garden?  I do not believe any gardener who loves his or her work could fail to see that "nature" is both intelligent, responsive to love and appreciation, and communicative.  It's not a human language, but language it is.  

When I was a kid in a long-ago confusing Bible classes, I had an early  "ah-ha" experience. In fact, that might have been at the root of what became my personal quest in life.  I was told, over and over, that "God loves us".  Yet  I could not understand how this  "God" that was so often described to me as we plowed through the Book, could be so cruel if He really "loved us".  He seemed a God of terrible vengence and capricious cruelty.   Even now, I shudder to think of children, like the child I was,  internalizing some of these stories as "divinely inspired". How about this, for example, from the Holy Book?

"And  the Lord spake unto Moses, saying "Avenge the children of Israel"..............and Moses said unto them, "Have ye saved all the women alive?.......Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.  But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."   

  Num. XXXI, 1-18

I remember reading this, and trying to fathom how the noble Moses, made so visible by Charleton Heston delivering the 10 Commandments......could be involved in what was actually being described here.  

All those women, old ladies, babies  and little boys hacked up with swords,  the little girls carried off to be raped, sanctified by "God" and His prophet.   How could I reconcile this horror?   Other options were needed.  And I never failed to try to find them in future years.  I am fortunate that I've come up with some pretty good answers.

And how sad, and conflicting, that a fragmented history of the bloody genocide practiced in ancient battles, fought beneath the banner of a tribal war god sometimes called Yahwah........should appear within the same book as  "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you" (Luke 6:27). 

Or, and this passage, a favorite of mine, which is not from the Bible at all, but rather from the long hidden and lost  Nag Hammedi Gospels, attributed to Jesus from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (the Twin)*** :

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you,  what you do not bring forth will destroy you." 

There it is!  The Divine Creative Force, expressing in everything and everyone. Early Christians called it "gnosis", knowledge of God within.   Joseph Campbell called it your personal  "bliss"......... it's the joy of creation,  and if we bring it forth, it energizes and informs and expands our lives and our vision, a ripple that spreads out not only from our lives but in a circle to the lives of many others.  If not expressed or known, the same reservoir of energy contracts, turns self-destructive, dark, stagnant.  Maybe, that's even one of the places tumors can come from. 

Be that as it may, I think it's so important to not "give your power away" as the popular saying goes, alhtough it can take time and the growth of self-awareness  to learn how not to do  that.  It's important to appreciate, in fact thoroughly enjoy,  the gifts that life has put on your banquet plate.

There's a wonderful passage in the ancient Sumarian stories of the goddess Inanna where she goes to visit Enki, the head of the Gods.  In a celebratory mood, he calls forth some heavenly beer, and the two get drunk together.   Enki gives Inanna many empowerments or gifts (called a "me") -  from the art of sexual seduction to the governing of cities to the making of cheese. At an event I attended in the 90's I saw this  cycle was enacted in participatory ritual theatre.  As  Enki offered each "me" (I always found that word for gift or power interesting), Starhawk, who led the group  in the role of Inanna, said loudly with conviction and gusto:  "I'll take it!"

Inanna with lion, ancient Sumarian tablet

We so often are afraid to say "I'll take it!"    Life continually gives us opportunities, afirmations, passions for making and creating, for "bringing forth that which is within".  But we are "embarroused", we decline because we think we're not "worthy", we don't want to seem "selfish".  And before you know it, the opportunities are gone, the well has dried up, passion has become something else.  

There are so many forces that discourage both creativity and talent  - one does not necessarily get love or acceptance for being "gifted".   I think of my own family, and the kind of "dumbing down" or "becoming invisible" dynamics I had to do in order to avoid my fathers abuse, or to be  tolerated by my envious brothers, who felt that any form of success on my part somehow diminished them. It was a way to survive as a child  that became a great disadvantage as an adult.   I still can witness myself going into  "invisibility" mode when encountering a field of competition or jealousy.

I've seen this operate in groups as well, groups that do not know how to facilitate or address this unconscious collective shadow aspect (a friend who prefers to remain anonymous calls it the "mediocrity prerequisite" for membership).    I do not mean to sound harsh, but many people live in toxic spheres where they are being energetically rewarded for being stupid, uncreative, or a "victim", and punished for not being so.  For not using their divine "Me"'s.   And I guarantee that if you live that way long enough, you will forget your "me"'s and begin to  demand the same currency from others.   It can take a long time to heal.........

Well.........I am grateful indeed to know so many  inspiring people  who are busy expressing the Divine Creative Force  joyfully - may we all, like Inanna, loudly proclaim:  "I'll take it!"

Here is an old interview with my favorite writer, Ursula Kroeber Leguin, on writing and creativity.  Indeed,  Leguin is one who held out both hands in her extraordinary creative life to "take it".  

"I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy."          (Ursula K. LeGuin)

 https://youtu.be/M73cyc9lhhI