.jpg)
Hello my Dear Friends and Clients,
I’m so happy to write to you, and to introduce you to the fulfillment of a life-long dream: to write and share about sacred spaces and places. I grew up near two California missions and explored them as a child, and always had this deep sense of presence and spirituality. As I grew older, it turned into this desire to visit every mission in California and write about it, to share the wonder and the mystery with the world.
This is a dream that I never followed, but it’s time. It’s time.
I’m fulfilling lots of dreams lately: from learning Cat’s Cradle, to practicing Calligraphy, to becoming a writer more formally and to unfurling this tiny, creative adventure with you. One that, hopefully, will take us on many adventures and journeys over the next five years to maybe a decade, and maybe all over the beautiful carpet of humanity and history?
The first place was a surprise to me, as I didn’t go looking for it but entered into it unexpectedly, and that was the Portland Japanese Garden. This place is a sacred space.
You can feel it as you walk it. What does it feel like? Well, it feels like stepping into a cathedral made of trees, where there is a hint of religion in the air. You can feel the spiritual heaviness in the branches, in the cool mist, in the presence of the place.
We came here, my husband and I, after a very low week in our lives, to cap off the end of a blue period involving mistaken health issues, one that was, thankfully, transformed with prayers and good results.
I honestly feel, in my heart, as if all of those prayers we had going for us shifted our reality, and almost like God said, “OK, I’ll pull out a new card for your future and insert it here. Reality shifted. Success.” I know that's not always how it works but I can't stop that quiet voice in my heart that wants to believe that's what happened.
So we decided to wander someplace special and different after all of this hardness, and we came here as we’d never seen it before.
What constitutes a sacred space?
Well, first, it has presence. The space tells you that it’s sacred. It says, “there have been prayers here. There are spiritual beings here. This space is transformed.”
That’s what the Portland Japanese Gardens are. They’re transformed.
I think it's the deliberate action of prayer, meditation, and care. The intentionality of the landscape. The recognition of the sacredness of the leaf, the tree, the step and the sound and feeling of the land. They work with nature to create beautiful gardens for you to wander among.
The whole place is like a labyrinth; a journey that you’re meant to walk through and then leave, having been transformed.
I was surprised by this, because there are so many people who wander here. It was the end of the day and they still came in by the hundreds, it felt like. And everything is commercial, in its way. I wondered at how much money the garden makes by day on ticket sales alone and it must be breathtakingly astronomical. Wonderfully so.
And there are places to wander with new friends, those new friends being all of the other pilgrims on this journey with you. And there are folks who will greet you, those being the trees, the bridges, and the Koi. Oh, the Koi.
My favorite greeters of them all.
There is a waterfall with beautiful Koi that wander over to you, and ask you, begging and pleading, to admire their beauty (and perhaps to deliver something to nibble on?). The Koi were constantly rubbing on each other, just a slip here and there, and they were ginormous and beautiful. I could have stayed there for millennia, maybe. Or at least as time and present company and the appropriateness of things would let me.
I don’t know if this mountainside in Portland was a sacred space before the Japanese Gardens came, or if they imbued it with such after they arrived, but there is no doubt as to the sacredness of the area.
It is a holy site in the way of holy sites. Go there and feel it for yourself. Take a pilgrimage. Say hello to the koi for me.
And one last note of the place: love and the joy of it.
This was a surprise. But here and there throughout there were happy couples. Not where they’re quiet and simply together, but what looked like couples in that first blush of love, where they’re playful and fun. A woman jumps on a man’s back and they’re laughing about something. A couple is sitting by the water, close to the touch. Another fun couple laughing in the distance.
There is a playful element of love in water, the air, the forest.
I’ve never really felt this in a sacred space but you saw, heard and witnessed it there. Why and how? I don’t know, exactly. I don’t know.
Once again, go there and feel for yourself. You won’t be surprised and you just might feel that deep connection to the Cosmos through the air, the trees, and the prayer of it.
