Spending Time Operating From Patterns We Form.
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Sacred space encodes a certain kind of energy, a tenor quite unlike the hustle of the sidewalks in my suburban apartment complex where harried neighbors let their dogs pee, scuffle to grab mail before hopping on a Zoom call, and generally manage the 10,000 details of everyday life.
Here where the 10,000 details dissipate, the 10,000 things come back to life, resurrecting in quiet, spacious silences.
I am primed because I got here by bike, and I consciously practiced contemplative cycling while riding this route.
It helps to have a “means in”, a long and slow portal to what I’ve already described as “yin”, a mode of being where you give yourself over to the emergent flow of the day, to spontaneous urges, ceasing all “goal-directed activity” for some duration: you move and act and “decide on what to do next” like a leaf finds its way downstream or driftwood in an ocean current lets the swell of pulsing water coax it this way or that.
It helps that this practice is conducive to riveting its users to mind-opening by virtue of awakening, circulating, and stimulating vital wakefulness in the body, continuous exertion and the unrelenting exposure of the elements, living out our days under the big, hard sun, hardness that chisels, cleanses, harmonizes, and refines.
I am on sanctuary grounds in semi-rural Colorado thirty-some miles southwest of Denver, a curated outdoor space amid sandy washes and clusters of deciduous trees.
I sit in the sandy dirt underneath a loose, yellow-green canopy, behind a stucco, terracotta-colored structure, the one with the small round window above a heavy wooden door that leads to the octagonal sanctuary where spiritual literature is kept, a guest book awaits visitors on a high-top entrance table, and items of special significance — candles, notes, photos, scriptures, keys, drawings, coins, old love letters — are left in a room painted blue with fluffy clouds and striking bands of bold yellow to depict shafts of sunlight.
A cow offers a low moo. Limey-green, narrow-leaf cottonwoods arc over a low-lying rock labyrinth. The buzz of whizzing vehicles, muscle cars, rallies of sputtering motorcycle gangs, dozens of different industrial-grade trucks hauling branches, garbage, and farm equipment, many oversized SUVs, can be heard on the nearby roads.
Weeds, saplings, and grasses litter these scrub oak and prickly pear cactus foothills mixed with bark, pebbles, dried pine needles, bits of curled-up leaf, and the occasional piece of plastic, foil, or nondescript black rubber I tuck inside my leggings to dispose of later. A dark butterfly flits through the ground cover in search of nectar.
The unrelenting buzz of traffic keeps rumbling, grumbling, humming, sailing over blistering hot asphalt on this abnormally hot day of record-breaking heat, the sound magnifying with the barest flicking of accelerator pedals wanting to get ahead, to eradicate “the time in between”, to feel powerful, unstoppable, in control.
Behind and beside the activity on the asphalt grid, a sacred, liminal space secretly stows itself away, begging to be discovered, dropped into, and lavishly explored, a fringe between pre-civilization and civilization, maybe even between older, cyclic time and the linear time we’re accustomed to, between desire and duty. Just where I like to be.
The reservoir nearest my apartment, as grateful as I am for its immediate recreation (making paddleboarding on one of its ponds easy to sneak in before a full work day), is still ordinary. This skirts something “beyond” and thus one could say I tap into a spiritual encounter with the land.
Perhaps that is because I find solitude on these grounds.
Even on a Monday morning, there will be families, friends, probably a blow-up raft island in the shape of a pixie unicorn, and socially-distant first dates, on those ponds at the reservoir, but here I run into not a single soul such that whispers between the trees become audible, the subconscious bubbles up and tunes in, the ancestors’ chorus strikes up and fills these airwaves.
Subtle energy can be felt here. Tendrils of insight, unspoken but subliminally-known facts stringing themselves together. It is quiet, peaceful, its rhythms slow, harmonizing, restorative, relaxing. The animals are guided by these unseen forces.
I reconnect with my deeper nature as I sit and let the relaxation take over, into the bowl of sacral being here amid heat, dirt, and shades of green that let in and obscure sunlight per the periodic pulse of the breeze — the grayish-green of sage leaves, the lemon-lime of certain willows, the forest green of Ponderosa pines.
The traffic, heard from a distance, signifies the bursting forth of the progressive element in our culture, the cutting edge of our technology: speed, metal, plastic, sirens, concrete. This foothills scrubland encompasses and surrounds as a nearly-forgotten substrate. When it is found again, sink your teeth in.
Offering a deeper home, our primeval grounds, restoring a sense of inner security, we remember the days of our ancestors, the weight of all that’s come before, somewhere deep in our cells.
Time here is not rushed: time abides steadily and unhurriedly. Whatever wants to show up unveils itself.
Biting bugs sip blood from the skin on my back. Waves of breeze and heat oscillate. A mother deer appears suddenly from the wash behind the grove and immediately stamps her front hoof on the dirt floor as she catches sight of me, her two Bambi-like fawns timidly poking their furry new existences from behind her. She is weary, and they are still unimprinted.
Cycles and cycles on this earth expose us to rounds and rounds of what is ugly, tender, torturous, titillating, tepid, trying, and, from it all, we determine somehow what is true. We form patterns. Constructs. Schemas. And then we spend our time operating from them, and at rare intervals, wonder if we should stick with the conditioning or deconstruct much of it.
But they, they just have blind instinct. Mama stomps again and the band bolts right and out of the scene.
I like it here for many reasons, and it seems I keep closer to the transition zone than I used to. The deeper I go into the untamed, still wild landscapes, the closer I get to the wild cats that have stalked me for prey. I like the “nature-culture nexus”, far enough in, but not too far, occupying a a “fringeland”.
This mode, this disconnect from the grid where the vehicles whiz by going from here to there so urgently, lands me in canyons, exploring crevasses and rock outcroppings and dry washes, sometimes it lands me in car washes.
Here the energy of Gaia, the Great Mother, Mother Nature*, is intact and dynamically pulsing if only faintly in the fringeland, this portal I find unto her “yin”. We are overlooking her, overriding her, outstripping her, but she, our substrate, must persist beneath the arrogance of our developments and drivenness.
Her energy cannot be destroyed and therein is preserved a direct transmission, an implicit remainder of a prehistoric time when we worshiped the Goddess in the form of matriarchal culture.
If I surrender to “being a conduit”, a transpersonal instrument, I surmise that my longings to get back to the dirt, the breeze, the many hours of sustained movement under the big, hard sun, and the simple naming of the 10,000 things (that in itself is a wonderful practice of gratitude), is an indication of our collective yearning to rebalance ourselves into being in a dynamic, equal partnership with doing, a marriage that creates dynamic equilibrium (which makes me think of “peace on earth”).
*the Woolgers present a rich, fascinating history of such in The Goddess Within
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Sarah McKelvey is a free spirit who enjoys introspecting, speculating, and writing about life, love, synchronistic experiences, identity, psyche, self-cultivation, and her various misadventures. She typically writes in the context of traveling, and is informed by Eastern wisdom traditions, depth psychology, and the iconoclastic teachings of Alan Watts. Words are her favorite medium. In her pursuits, she pursues truth, beauty, and goodness, and hopes to, through her endeavors and writing, promote a life-affirming attitude that belongs on the spectrum of love. She lives along the Front Range outside of Denver, and practices psychotherapy professionally.
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