Prose: The Power of Place

I marvel at how different landscapes, different terrains, give me the opportunity to experience something new in myself, or immediately transport me to a familiar, hopefully well-loved place.

Just driving near a body of water opens up my emotional field so that I can’t wait to see it, stand in its energy field up close and let my feelings relax.

A stream is different from a lake, which is different yet again from a river or the ocean. Moving water moves me. Still water gives me a place to breathe in slowly and exhale ever slower.

Mountain ranges show me the faces of guardians and critters who live within its confines. Majestic and boundary-making, they lift me out of my daily thinking and invite me into a larger sensing, a wilder knowing in a deeper part of my brain. Because I’ve run naked by streams and in meadows in the higher elevations, in my younger days, often being up in there now reminds me that my skin is actually a protection on the edges of myself, and that clothes are a chosen adaptation.

The freezing glacial waters that run through these stone structures allow me to have rushes of energy released up my spine as my feet enter these ice cold temperatures on the creek’s edge.

Forests, deep, silent and brooding, surround me in green light, embrace me in an elfin dance and I am drawn to the grandmother or grandfather tree in the midst of it. Here I give my acknowledgement of all things held in conscious awareness by this ancient being.

Temples, churches and sacred sites all have their magic. For some it is the combined energies of pilgrims and searchers over centuries of time, all contributing to the energy field that I step into as I approach these places. For others, it is the initial happening that created a vortex of energy that other molecules have attached themselves to and furthered the energetic.

Even my unfenced garden in north Boulder in the late 80’s held a place of peace and possibility as I lay my heart on the straw in between the raised unboarded beds. Smelling the sweetness, giving my energy of appreciation or angst back to the earth was part of my prone choice. It allowed me to let my heart open and release the energy held inside with a sense that the earth would grow flowers with it.

Jyoti