I add my voice to the conversation and have one answer to that question: Communion. Communion is people actively engaging with a place, learning and declaring its existing archetypal field, collectively reshaping that dynamic force, and tending the transformed field as a communal practice.

Thomas Berry prescribed communion as part of the triptych necessary to change our worldview to heal our world when he said: embrace differentiation, honor subjectivity (Buber’s I/Thou relationship), and act in communion  — the ever present reciprocity of a webbed world. Decades before Berry, CG Jung described the interactive power of archetypal forces at play in our natural and cultural reality, and gave tools to enter in that dance with image and story. Prior, the earth has had some 30,000 years and 6,000 cultures where people made an active practice of “communing” with places in order to welcome/encourage change and align themselves to the emerging Field. They were called ceremonies.

Levi aptly explains that it is in the relationship between the sacred-in-us and the sacred-in-the-Other (i.e. places) where the divine/aliveness/dynamism can enter. The place where spirit and matter meet is soul – a landscape where story and image is the aboriginal tongue. So to meet in this in-between, we must access through the motion of in-between: story and ceremony.

We at Altar Places are beginning to work with urban communities so they can align themselves to a new emerging archetypal field that can sustain their neighborhood, we call this ceremonial placemaking. In future posts I will share our answers to: how to heal places, the role of Tibetan Buddhist thought in placemaking (a woman named Barb really wanted to know), and how to call forth an archetype that can change a culture.

For now, if you could be attuned to a place and its surrounding archetypal field where would you choose and why?

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It is 10:28 AM TEN YEARS LATER. All human sound hushes as a bell somberly wails in staccato. The next sound we hear? The thunder of Water Fall, roaring, unrelentlessly clearing and cleansing the decade death story of Ground Zero. Did you know the rescuers did not use that name for the downed towers and human wreckage – they called it The Mound. Life is still possible in a mound.

What’s in a name? Everything of meaning, a place’s story. Names are a conjuring of sorts–naming calls something into existence. Sunday’s anniversary events are the most dramatic, public ceremony to date to re-story this site of national and personal disaster. Once called: mound, ground zero, a hole (ouch, Ray Nagin), now “The World Trade Center and the National September 11th Memorial and Museum.” Did it work?

Let’s take a look at 3 ceremonial medicines set in motion from the Memorial:

1. A decade of time to unravel the violence of mere seconds: In minutes, 3000 people were massacred, too many vaporized, to few remains discernible from the dust. Ever notice how in wisdom stories and mythic tales events take a long time -  a story requires 40 days and 40 nights to tell, a castaway boy returns as a man, kingdoms sleep for 100 years — deep transformation takes time.
2. Public and political debates were fought to find an identity, a new purpose for 16 acres of Lower Manhattan: in the three phases of initiatory ceremony the middle stage is characterized as being de-fleshed of prior identity, in complete flux like the chrysalis phase of the butterfly (I remember the shock when I first learned the pupa is ooze and not just a worm getting dressed up in pretty wings in a very small dressing room); officials argued desperately for a new identity structure while the rescuers and clearing crews intimately handled the life-cum-dust; ooze is ooze.
3. Reflection pools, acre wide pools of waterfalls that cascade to bedrock: The Twin Towers lived in the sky, the element of air, still yet soaring upward, icons of financial power, visible for miles, masculine in form, a vying neighbor for the sky-god; and now the Memorial dressed in element of water, in constant motion downwards, into the earth, disappearing from sight but alive in sound, feminine in form, flowing back to the mother-god.

Despite the fact America does not have much practice at healing war torn homeland – acknowledging Pearl Harbor yet the conspicuous absence of efforts in Miami, East LA, and Anytown USA where gang and drug violence occurs – I think the memorial fountain park in New York is potent ceremonial grounds to catapult soulful recuperation for both our culture and the land.

In terms of placemaking here is why: a man-made disaster of epic proportion requires epic counterbalance to bring that place and its people back into symmetry. The remedy for the image of the plumed tumbling towers embedded in our culture’s psyche is another vast image that unbinds the event and releases the trapped story of terror. Such iconic medicine comes from collective, archetypal wisdom.

I would like to say they must have had a psychologist-of-culture on staff for the New York Memorial to assure my own job security, but the truth of it is that there are iconic medicines with such agency they cannot be kept out of human expression when the world is in such essential need. This 8 acre shrine is the dynamic, organic result of a community working with artists to craft healing, sacred place by listening –to world soul.

The Ceremony to heal the land and our culture started 10 years ago and we are still in it. How do you see it?

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We hereby gift with Our Lapis Nomad Award

The Confluence Project is a 300-mile long public art installation spearheaded by artist/architect Maya Lin and Pacific Northwest tribes. They are joined by  artists, architects, landscape designers, and civic groups to explore the crossroads of landscape, cultures, ecology and the region’s history.  In seven communities along the Columbia River, the watery border between Oregon and Washington, they will design “new points of contact – confluence – between nature and art; past, present and future; and the enduring communities of the Pacific Northwest.”

Their medium? Art and Place

These multi-cultural visionaries and artists are re-storying the Columbia Basin from the lone conquerors’ story of Lewis and Clark “discovering” the river  and “claiming” the land for the US Government.  The crafted works reveal the collective stories that thrived in the landscape hundreds of years prior:

• storycircles, embedded with images and oral  story wisps, placed where peoples gathered in community and festival for 10,000 years
• acres of freshly planted native grasses and wildflowers rustling once again in the Gorge winds
• an anticipated memorial for the lost voice of Celilo Falls and erased fishing ceremonies of the Celilo region tribes

To their credit, the Confluence activists weave in actual excerpts from Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s personal journals, giving voice to the curious men themselves, separate from the political agenda of the time.

This group of artist/activists, by their varied membership an expression of confluence themselves, are Wisdom Keepers. They guide us to re-member that Places gather stories, a Place is multi-vocal, and protecting an environment includes protecting the stories that live there as well. Through embodied, artful, ancestral engagement with the organic matter of the Pacific Northwest, they reveal for us the imprints, the totemic-patterns, previously in-visible and invite them to  re-emerge for the benefit of All.

The Confluence Project

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Our Lapis Nomad Award is gifted throughout the year whenever we find a person or project that works to help some part of our World recuperate by weaving the archetypal, spiritual and ancestral layers of awareness into activism. They are welcome allies on the path of ceremonial placemaking –

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The largest reclining Buddha in the world measures 300 feet long and 60 feet high and lives in the Union of Myanmar (known as Burma when the statue was carved).  The Shwethalyaung Buddha has a relaxed look on his face and his feet casually rest one against the other.  He is in a state of Enlightenment.  On the bottom of each towering foot are the imprints of 108 auspicious symbols.  If one stands in the shadow of his feet and looks up, his toes arise like a mountain range against the skyline.

8:45 am          I drop my 13-year old daughter at her middle school and race off to the airport.

“Fields predate the configuration of matter and . . . matter emerges out of these prefigured informational fields” –Ervin Lazlo

Images of engraved footprints exist in 16 countries in Asia and are carved in stone, alabaster, silver, and gold.  The oldest ones date back to nearly 2500 years. Just in the ancient city of Bagan, Burma, archeologists excavated two thousand individual sites of Buddha’s feet.  Although all footprints do not have the same details, they all tell the story of Buddha and his teaching.

9:25 am            I am in line to check my baggage and my mind careens through my internal “To-Do” lists trying to assure myself that my family is set while I am gone to this conference. Suddenly, my IPod begins to play in my purse. As I pull it out to shut it off, I see the song title “Creating an Enlightened Society” by Nawang Khechog.

There are also natural rock imprints recognized as footprints of the Buddha.  One of the most famous pair is atop Sri Pada (“Holy Footprint”), known as Adam’s Peak in English, a mountain in the southwest jungles of Sri Lanka. The actual prints measure 5 ½ feet by 2 ½ feet. They were discovered in 104 BCE.  Pilgrims believe the rainwater gathered from these sacred impressions is a powerful healing medicine.

“The presence and existence of the archetype is felt through its effects”—Michael Conforti

9:42am            I walk down the overcrowded concourse pulling my wheeled carry-on with a tight fist. In my head I vacillate between affirming myself for attending an out-of-state conference sponsored by an organization I am unfamiliar, in a place I have never been, with no one I know including my assigned roommate . . . and then alternately criticizing myself for all the above.  How did this ever make sense?

A cello begins to play, low and warbling.  A solitary musician sits on his stool, in the middle of the walkways. He holds an oddly proportioned instrument on his lap as commuters stream by him. I stop to listen; the cello is my favorite stringed instrument. As I stand out of the way I breathe more evenly and my shoulders relax. My mind slows.

Somehow the marriage of the footprint symbol and this mountain place calls so powerfully that it overtakes cultural zones. The Sri Pada Footprints are the source for annual pilgrimages in four major religions: Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian.  According to Buddhists, underneath the earthly marks are the original prints of the Buddha cast in sapphire. Hindus revere the marks as a sacred place where Shiva danced the Dance of Creation.  Muslims believe that when Allah cast Adam out of paradise, he stood there as penance for a thousand years.  Lastly, Christians believe the footprints belong to St. Thomas, an early missionary to Sri Lanka.

9:47am            I walk up to the musician to thank him for being a source of sanity in the hectic terminal. Now that I am close, I see the details of his lap-size, squat-body, long-neck cello. It seems like something out of some Irish fairy tale. He carved a female spirit for the scroll; he explains it is the soul of his instrument.  I learn he is playing selections from his CD “Ritual.”

The 108 symbols on the sole of Buddha are like footprints within those footprints. Footprints mark the path of a great spiritual teacher, as if a fresh track lay before us. The imprints left on the ground by these enlightened beings echo the marks they leave on our soul, beckoning us to follow.  More footprints within footprints within.

“The pursuer cannot pursue,” explains Ortega y Gasset, “if he does not integrate his vision with that of the pursued.”

10:30am            I stash my purse under the seat in front and buckle my seatbelt.  A few rows before me, stands the divider between First Class and Commuter Class.  On that carpeted wall is the airlines emblem of a red heart with blue wings. But it is like an Escher drawing and switches to a barn owl flying directly at me. Emblem then owl. Inanimate then animate. Anonymous then meaningful.  Inside then outside. Manmade flight then Wild-made flight. This world then the Other World.

“Rather than getting stuck in trying to analyze the paradox, we should simply let it open us up”—John Van Eenwyk

It is not only the icon of footprints which guide a people along a path, but the in-visible patterns revealed in the magnetizing synchronicities that align them to a clearer purpose or re-visioned Story.  The most powerful ones are those that are born in a community’s place, fed by the same soil, brushed by the same breeze, and watered by the same rain as the people. That is how we recognize each other. In a sense, the ground and environs are the footprints of the enlightened ones.

5 Days Later

4:32pm            I am back in the air flying home. I look out the window and there imprinted on a mountain of clouds is the shadow of my plane encircled by a rainbow. Yes, it has been a significant trip: I connected with others who share the mission to heal wounded places, some who even guide ceremonial placemaking in their communities; I am not alone. I also met a surprising number of women who, like me, were tapped on the shoulder by Owl as the Spirit Guide for their work.

I smile. I realize I have been on a kind of pilgrimage since I left home. I wanted to remember all the pieces and signs gifted to me along the way so I pull out some notepaper. I begin by numbering the lines on my page 1-108.

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Long ago and yesterday, a fisherman cast his net out and upon the blue ocean.  His people fished these waters as long as any one could remember. The winds blew softly and his boat bobbed gently. Everything was just as it should be, he thought to himself. Just then his net began to writhe, suddenly, powerfully. If it were not for the six-generation-skill born in his arms and legs, he may not have been able to respond fast enough to balance the thrashing lode.  Two e

This could be the opening to many old tales or even a Jungian self-help workshop. But it is an event in recent history. In 1938 a South African fisherman caught a coelacanth, a fish declared extinct for 65 million years. After examining the 6.5 foot 175 pound “ghost,” ichthyologist Dr J.L.B. Smith of the nearby East London Museum pronounced the species in existence. Science books were re-written, museum fossil descriptions updated, and marine biology lecture notes corrected.  How can Western science misdiagnose a species as non-existent? Can it really be because we haven’t seen one for a while?

Recall that our ocean is divided into five zones—each one a unique landscape of light and pressure-per-inch. All layers of the ocean are necessary and support the other layers. Each zone bares a scientific label, but as a mythophile I am pleased that they are commonly referred to as: The Sunlight Zone, The Twilight Zone, The Midnight Zone, The Abyss, and The Trenches (yes, this last one needs a better name). A fish is designed to survive in one zone but can implode or explode if forced into another zone.

Our “living fossil” the coelacanth lives in the Midnight Zone of the ocean, about 2,000 feet deep. It must stay in its pressurized habitat in order to survive.  Humans have only recently — recently in the perspective of a 250 million year old fish— been able to travel into such depths. We had to develop the tools and technology to go have a look-see for ourselves. Until then, we were like the disbelieving fisherman in our tale. In the Midnight world, luminescent eyes are not alien but adaptive; a jaw full of fangs assures a regular meal.  What we land-lubbers judge as monstrous, denizens of the deep consider customary.

The moral of my story: In the ocean biome, everything is equally real but not always accessible.

Where I am going:  Our reality is tiered just like the ocean. We live in layers of awareness where everything is equally real but not always accessible.

Back up on dry land,  the zones of awareness are:

• physical
• emotional
• cognitive
• social/political
• ancestral
• archetypal
• spiritual (yes, they all need better names)

They are present simultaneously, support each other, and each are equally as real.  Scientist and environmentalists swim comfortably in the first 4 zones; they assure that the  places we care about are described by their ecology, mapped and measured, and legally protected.  But notice, three of the seven zones have been declared  either “uninhabitable” or “extinct” by contemporary standards the: ancestral, archetypal, and spiritual. What lives there —and ultimately supports where we currently swim—existed for “those” people “back then” before we “knew better.” At best there are attempts to categorize them for “historic preservation.” This means we build real nice display cabinets for them.

By exclusively valuing scientific and literal awareness, we limit our access to almost half of reality. We fossilize the communication tools of Story and Ceremony that can transport us safely into these additional zones. We rule primitive a sophisticated level of intelligence that hears and reads the storylines in the landscape; we judge based on our land-lubber ways. We petrify the voices of the Land. Maybe that is why we haven’t seen or heard them for awhile?

I know the answer to the fisherman’s question – the coelacanth is a blessing.

So do you want to go fishing? First, you are going to need a net. Some ideas on how to make a net: keep a synchronicity journal to capture the meaningful coincidences that guide you; make art -notice how and when your idea is re-directed by the piece itself leading your hands; carry a personal sacred object (icon, stone, symbol) on your person, touch it when you feel discomfort in your day, notice what occurs. It is skill building, a practice, an intelligence as is tying knots of a net. The dexterity of casting and sinking are yet to come.

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Most “sacred space” articles I read assume the only sacred place a person would want is serene and quiet. Authors prescribe melodic music, diffuse white light, or rhythmic breathing. I have no quarrel with serene places and recognize that with the hectic pace of Western daily life this surely provides a respite. My point though is that there is an underlying mono-myth that “sacred” means to be subdued in the presence of the Divine, that God wants us to be small, quiet, and obedient. At times it even seems like a fearful stance, as if the human voice can drown out Spirit or frighten the gods away. It is as if the ghosts of Puritan early America are still steering the “religious freedom” ship.

Somehow we have it in our craw that if we lift our feet in a beating rhythm we may smite the Source. But this is not the whole experience of being with Presence. We need only awake to the world around us to realize humans hold the only faction of silence-worshipers on the planet. Birds are not silent at daybreak, they begin their call to the Sun before the first rays arise, squawking, crowing, cawing. Waterfalls announce their prostrations hundreds of yards in the distance before we feel the spray on the face. Somehow in current lore, silence is reverent when Wilderness teaches sway, beat, chatter, echo, guttural rush is the native tongue of Life; in the laws of the wild-sacred only death is silent and then just for a moment between exhale and the whisper of cellular collapse.

What if we re-membered the Numinous presents as a burst in sudden eruption from the depths of soul with spasms and convulsions…strange excitements…frenzy—as Rudolf Otto got it already 100 years ago. This Christian philosopher, who gave us the word numinous, voiced concern for the unnecessary silencing of Mystery at the turn of the twentieth century. What if we remember our sound and language are not to label the world but “to call ourselves into vital presence of that world” a la David Abrams?

What if we remember “like attracts like”?

Children in public schools would unfurl prayer carpets, sing and bow; drums and rattles would sound, circles form, bodies dance, Life called forth. We could hear the mourners for dead gang youth as we walk on “safe” sidewalks blocks away. A quartet band would announce the miracle of a soldier’s return home alive from Afghanistan.

I think that when people are in need, pain, despair what they desire most is Life – the flow that cannot be tempered, the rustling cycle of the compassion refusing to leave any of us stuck and still. To attract Life we must mimic life to draw it near, to magnetize and welcome, to give it a Place. Sound– be it voice, tune, clang, thrums, warble, keen, pant– is our bait. Life attracts Life.

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Listening to the land is about our wildness meeting Wilderness. Our wildness roams the territory of art, song, story and ceremony. This is not the literalized meditative mind that mistakes “silence” for nature and “sound” for progressive culture. I do not fault the indigenous (here used in its place-context meaning “of the land”) teachings transplanted from places such as Tibetan Mountains or Thai Jungles; these ancient place-woven Wisdoms become gutted in a communities who allow consciousness only in the human head. We are left to chase the space between thoughts in our suburbanized minds like so many merry-go-round horses. Silence is quite un-natural really.

The World’s Voice is noisy, patterned, pocked, breathy, rhythmic, arrhythmic, shrill. So we best listen to the land in a call-and-response: drum, whistle, sing, chant, gurgle, rumble hum. THEN listen; first with our ears, then with the hairs on our arms, our inner ear, the nape of our neck. Call out again from the gut, let our voice crack. Any tears that follow just may be the sorrow of the Land who has been long awaiting our coming home.

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The World Tree is the map to bring healing and Life Force into our world: the First Peoples’ Shamanic Tree; the Buddhist Bodhi Tree; the Kabbalah Tree of Life; the Muslim Tree of Life; the Christian Celtic Cross. This ancient, totemic pattern teaches many Truths of our life: that we live in layers that must be honored equally (above/below), that we can live in diversity without conflict (branches/roots, absorb water/share oxygen), that we live most vitally when we allow the seasons and not command chronic expansion, that we live in Mystery and do not run the show. There are so many more…

For some reason in this time of human history we are actively trying to erase our Teacher of some 30,000 years – why now?

Saving the wild forests sustains our wild access to the in-visible Life Force. I suggest beyond “tree hugging” we alter our awareness to re-member the Presence wrapped in Tree that we humans have recognized and welcomed throughout our existence. Altar a Tree.

You can join with the planet’s people and re-commit to trees at: http://www.unep.org/billiontreecampaign

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My dreams and visions are inviting me to shift, re-focus softly despite the glare from our current American pattern that fights to keep all and any light on so we never question, wonder, regret. I am accepting this invitation to feel in the darkness, meet wilderness with my wilderness, speak of the in-visible, and help re-story our world, and kraft placemaking.

Will the Google search engine pick up my blogs if I use the twilight language “sacred place” rather than “sacred space?” Or awaken old stories with new language still sticky on our Western tongues because we let their ancestors fall away when, with gaping mouths, we grabbed for what we could see and measure, those things that only sparkle when the light is left on?  I guess I will find out. It is not that I don’t care about technology, it is more like attending knee deep to the roaring waterfall in front of me as the source rather than  the warm water from the faucet. Which would you companion?

I share with you my new vision for my work–watch for the outward changes to come! Re-Visioning World Soul

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For the scientist in us: Masaru Emoto the scientist and author of Hidden Messages in Water and The True Power of Water has shown how destructive thoughts have a negative impact on water. He developed a process using high-speed photography that shows how the crystal structure of water is deformed when exposed to hostile messages, and how those same droplets are “healed” when exposed to loving and compassionate thoughts.

For the soul in us: Grandma Agnes Baker -Pilgrim speaks the Siletz tribal wisdom that has always known water is a vital, sacred force that sources all. Even sitting by water heals. She says we as a people have forgotten to talk and thank the Waters, we have forgotten to be grateful. She reminds us we are all “water-babies.”

Both of these elders tell us it is the Story of Water that we have forgotten. We forget that we are water, we forget that all waters connect to all waters, we forget that we forget. Perhaps that one stings the most. In ceremony we tell the deeper stories. In the ceremony of water we say we have forgotten, we ask forgiveness, we show our gratitude. We tell the story of water.

This is not an act of consecration, but more a remembering: to speak the truer story in motion, song, and word. Over many days, over time. A story needs to be told over and over again. On the shrine:

1. Pour water into beautiful vases, say “Namaste” which means: the sacred in me sees the sacred in you. The water in me, the life force in me sees the life force that is you. I thou.

2. Speak to a small bowl of water, let it live on your shrine for a while; then go pour it at the base of a tree, or in the rain gutter outside you home. Let it carry the remembering.

3. Pray to a waterway you have concern for – a local river, the Gulf, the thawing glaciers. Send an apology, speak its story of Source, send it compassion.

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