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Sacred Landscapes
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morfe
morfe
2992 posts

All sacred.
Jul 30, 2003, 20:58
This is a wonderful discussion. I don't agree that no land is sacred. I don't know much about megaliths, but I can put a stone in the ground. I really truly believe that so much of our interest in megalithia is born just from our desire to step outside. It gives us focal point from which to experience the bigger focal point. I cannot come to terms with the fact that 'nature' is referred to as 'outside' It is inside us, and all around us, but not 'outside'.

Something 'sacred' to me, is something useful to me. Reductionist theories are usually disproving hypotheses, therefore inclined towards non-experience other than the umbra nihil, the great nothingness from which learning comes? I view 'sacred' landscapes (traditionally) as just EXAMPLES of a culture. The culture revered the land, it was echoed in the treatment of the land. We are in the death throes of our reverence. Our culture is a use-it-up-and-look-elsewhere culture. Much of our culture (Western Capitalism) has had it's umbilical cord stretched so far from the land via techno-jabber and proxy, that it has forgotten the truth of the great spirit . It has been replaced by the great nothingness of mental laziness, afforded by living out lives of proxy. That is to say, we shop, therefore we are. All land is sacred, unless one is a committed nihilist? Any land 'set aside' or managed for 'spiritual' use, whether burial or worship, or communication with the gods/esses, is land that is USED ), it is land that every bit as important (if not more so) than land set aside for crops. Anyone that has ever personally harvested from the land knows about sacred space. Surely? I'd like to add that a space made sacred to remind us that ALL is sacred, is the most sacred of spaces. I can see how people balk at the word 'spritual' and 'sacred', because for some, there are neither things. And I don't mean that derogatorily. I appreciate someone by their effect, not their belief.

And spiritually,/developmentally/intellectually, I cannot say strongly enough how many lessons are to be learned from the natural landscape and its denizens. It hurts and angers so much to see that we are pulling down our global 'school' for salesmen.

That's all to too 'rational' for me, so I'll let someone else say what I feel:

"I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better."


from Sleeping In The Forest by Mary Oliver
In reply to:
Re: Sacred Landscapes (baza)
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