One of the first times I reached it was when I visited the “Man of the Delta”, who I think may be one of my muses. He is a crooked old man with leathery skin and a wry smile, and he lives in an earthen / adobe tower in the midst of a swampy, sandy delta. When I first visited there, I didn’t know how it was connected to the rest of my inner landscape; but in April of last year I found the path. I was doing a meditation on my fiction writing (which had not been going smoothly) and had drawn the Hermit card. Here are some notes I took at the time.

The Man of the Delta

“I returned to the Hermit’s tower in the Forest of Branching Paths (which I’d first visited last summer, when I was working on that whole ‘deserving success’ issue), and he introduced me to an old man. The old man was old because his energy was spent moving from task to task, never setting his burden down or allowing the gods to carry it for a while. It ran him to age and thus to dust. (Definitely a warning!) What was the alternative? The Hermit pointed me towards a monk, a young man dressed in red with black eyes dotted with stars. He had infinite strength because the gods do his heavy lifting. It’s a matter, the Hermit said, of taking the time to rest, recharge, and allow the gods space to work.

He then showed me a doorway that led to a room where sunlight was falling from high, high above. This room was at the bottom of a tall tower. All up the sides of the tower spiraled a wooden staircase, and I started climbing it. I climbed forever and ever… At last I arrived at the last place I expected — the top of the adobe tower of the Man of the Delta. Everything was pretty much the same there, but now I understood it to be a very ‘high vibration’ place. My sense was that I should visit this area more often, and work with the two men here (who I now understand to be reflexes of the “two” hermits in the tower below).

My big take-away is to allow Spirit to work through me. With rest, exercise, and meditation, the energy will flow and everything will unfold the way it should.”

The Sea-Cedars

Since then I’ve visited other upper, ‘high-vibration’ areas. Sometimes I have to climb up to them; other times I slip into them as soon as I enter meditation. This is how I described it in notes last July:

“It’s usually very misty, and the colors less vivid. Also, it’s harder to ‘see’ things; and I have less freedom of movement. It’s as if I am a ‘child’ here — I can’t see the tops of things or around them without a lot of work, and there are some areas I simply can’t go at all.

There are two areas here I’ve explored. One is the Delta area, which I’ve described before. If I get on a boat on the sea at the edge of the Delta, I’ll arrive at a wooded coastline. The coast is cedar trees I think mostly, with a forest floor coated with needles. The woods are inhabited by beings I think of as ‘elves’, with slate-white robes. They are exceedingly tall and thin. Some are bearded, some have long white or blond hair; they are kindly, and they care for me. They have a home, or complex of homes, here in the trees, which are much like the house at Rivendell in the movie Lord of the Rings. Overall it is a perfect place for relaxing and recuperating, and I get a sense that part of my spirit spends a fair bit of time here, doing just that. There are rooms with cozy fires, and somewhere in it I have a small bedroom where they often tend to me…

By the water, there is a dock or pier area, made of marble. I do not know if vessels ever visit here.

Inland a bit the cedar forest opens up into a huge meadow, and in the grass is a complex ‘henge’ of large white stones. It is definitely astrological in pattern. In the center of it is a tall white stone, which I think has carvings on it — though the mists are always thick here, and I can never visit without my tall white guardians. The central white stone is directly ‘above’ Apollo’s temple in the lower landscape.

Beyond that, I can’t see much of the terrain. I get the impression of forests and mountains beyond the meadow in one direction, and the other way I think there are bona fide deserts, perhaps with tall stony towers like one finds in the American southwest, but I’m not sure. I know it is a region of horses, somehow.”

Seattle Spring

The 2nd week of January, as I mentioned in the Sound article, we flew to Seattle and found our apartment; the third week I had to go to Las Vegas for a business trip; and then the next week we moved away from Pittsburgh. The final week of January we were driving across the country. We spent two nights in Albuquerque, and I particularly felt the touch of the landscape there: as we crossed the continental divide west of the city, it was like I’d tipped over the edge at last and was coming to the Glittering World, as the Navajo call it… And on Feb 1 we rolled into Seattle.

Then there was a lot of unpacking and cleaning and whatnot, and both Alison and I have been a bit off-balance since we arrived. We’ve gotten in touch with some local friends, and taken some long walks in the neighborhoods and parks, and we’re starting to get our bearings and establish some routines.

But one thing that took me completely by surprise was the fact that the higher-vibration landscape is strongly connected with the Pacific Northwest. The forest by the water, with the elvish city and the stone quays — this is the landscape here. The trees are exactly the same as what I saw in meditation — not just in how they look, but in how they feel. I’m not sure about the grassy meadow out beyond the trees, but the white standing stone is some sort of hub, a spiral / web connection with all things. Not the World Tree itself: that I’ve located further out, in the direction of the deserts. But in general, since I got out here, I’ve gotten more of my bearings at this ‘higher’ level, and felt more at home there.

One aspect of the Seattle landscape that was definitely missing from my inner-landscape vision is the white-capped mountains visible to the east and west. They’re not always there, but when the skies are clear they are impossible to miss; and they touch the heart profoundly. For now we’ve only seen them marching in the distance, but at some point we’ll drive out to them and introduce ourselves properly. They are guardians of a sort, I feel; gods, in fact.

Except perhaps Rainier. That one seems older, less friendly… Perhaps less a god than an old earth spirit, a Jotun, a Titan. One to keep an eye on.

Similar Posts

• Zen and the Art of Tarot II: Meditation and Release
• On Thanksgiving
• Blood and Bone
• Mapping the Inner Landscape
• Ruminations Under an Oak
• The Great Bear III: Old Grandfather
• Feather, Stone, and Light: Meditation Interlude

Alison advised me not to answer or argue again: I was in the right, and I should simply let it go. I agreed with Alison — at least, my mind did. But my heart found it hard to accept disappointing my friend.

In meditation, I thought about what I really wanted from friendships in the future. My guides and my gut agree that, in the past, I have been too accommodating, too willing to put the needs of others before myself. How could I fix this?

To inspire my meditation, I used my favorite deck, the Buddha Tarot by Robert Place. I drew these:

1. The Animal of Double Vajras (Garuda). The Garuda is a magical animal guide of healing, destroyer of evil monsters and corrupting powers. The Double Vajras correspond roughly to Water, but the Garuda is a creature of the air.
2. 10 of Jewels (Greed) The 10 of Jewels is about material satiety, and the greed that engenders.
3. 9 of Lotuses (Sacrifice) The Sacrifice is cutting away something that is valued.

In meditation, I felt drawn to the Forest of the Horned God. At the base of the World Tree, a spiral of wooden steps rose around the trunk, carrying me up above the treetops, so that I could see the white-capped Mountains of the Earth in the distance. They ended at a sort of tree house perched right above the tallest branches of the surrounding forest.

The house — which I understood to be the eyrie of the Garuda — was semicircular, jutting from the trunk rather like a shelf fungus. Structurally it was, in essence, a great half-circle of porch, with an elegantly architectured wooden house nested in the center of it. I didn’t see much of the house (though I got an impression of ash-wood and glass and brass, elegance and comfort, airiness). The porch, on which I stood blinking in the late afternoon sunlight, was of some kind of stone, decorated with precious metals and jewels in an astrological pattern, like a birth-chart carved into the floor.

The Garuda was man-shaped, tall, and dressed elegantly in red; his face was vaguely animal — a beaklike nose, deep eyes, and an expression of profound comfort in his own skin. He offered me tea (a nod to the watery associations of the Double Vajra, he said), and I gratefully accepted.

I asked him about relationships and boundary-setting. He said that as I get closer to my ideals of life and profession (10 Jewels), my relationships will change profoundly; and I’m going to have to give some of them up (9 Lotus).

“If people are used to you being accommodating, they will be upset when you change,” he said. “And you will continue to be uncertain about the right thing to do; because you’re in the midst of the change — you’re on shifting ground.”

“But,” he contined, “there is always a source of guidance: the Earth. Do you remember, when you first got the request from your friend, immediately you felt like it would be wrong to say yes?”

“Yes,” I said. “I wanted to help her, but I had a strong feeling that I shouldn’t. I wasn’t sure where the intuition came from, and I didn’t want to be unfair to her, so I pushed it away.”

“You pushed it away because you wanted to subordinate your own needs to someone else,” he said. “To gain approval, to be liked. But that intuition is your rock, your connection with the Earth. Listen to it. It will lead you right.”

Just before the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, realized enlightenment, it is said the demon Mara attacked him with armies of monsters to frighten Siddhartha from his seat under the bodhi tree. But the about-to-be Buddha did not move. Then Mara claimed the seat of enlightenment for himself, saying his spiritual accomplishments were greater than Siddhartha’s. Mara’s monstrous soldiers cried out together, “I am his witness!” Mara challenged Siddhartha–who will speak for you?

Then Siddhartha reached out his right hand to touch the earth, and the earth itself roared, “I bear you witness!” Mara disappeared. And as the morning star rose in the sky, Siddhartha Gautama realized enlightenment and became a Buddha. — Barbara O’Brien

In the same way, if I keep one hand on the Earth, I will not go wrong, even if my universe of friends is upended. I do not need their approval, if the Earth is my foundation.

Oddments

• A tremendous manifesto from Ali — one of the best things she’s written all year. “Ritual is not for our sake alone… our religious communities are not only human.”
• Would you kill an elephant? The complex tangle of justice woven between an internet tycoon and an angry young bull.
• Subscribe to my flickr photostream, and get updates whenever I create a new landscape like the one below.
• This deck… O my friends, this deck I must have. Steampunk Tarot.
• Get Into the Grove: new druid blog from OBOD bard, Moncha.
• Quotes:
  • Books are good company… for books are people – people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book. – EB White
  • Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower… soaking in around your green beans. – Marcelene Cox
  • Sun-bleached bones are most wonderful against the blue, that blue that will always be there after all man’s destruction is finished. O’Keefe
  • The night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does. – Borges
  • We all have our blind spots. To what extent do we *choose* those blind spots — subconsciously — in order to have the life we want?
  • The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture, where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, and the more it nourishes. – Huxley

Similar Posts

• My Anima
• Reconciling Dreams and Reality IV: the Struggle for Interpretation
• The Eight-Circuit Tarot Deck II: Medium and Message
• Reconciling Dreams and Reality II: The Pool of the Moon
• The Eight-Circuit Tarot Deck I: Alchemy, Astrology, and Jung, Oh My!
• Reconciling Dreams and Reality I: Balancing the Sun and Moon
• Uprooted

I was recently divorced, and had just met an extraordinary woman; but she lived five hundred miles away.  Ali was in Pittsburgh, and I lived in Massachusetts, near my children, my ex-wife, and her fiancé.  At first I resigned myself to a long-distance relationship, and had little hope that it could become serious and long-term.  But then I found that, completely by coincidence, my ex-wife’s fiancé’s parents lived in Pittsburgh as well; and this confluence, plus Pittsburgh’s lower cost of living, better employment prospects, beautiful mountains and rivers, and moderate climate decided all of us that we should simply move everybody wholesale.  So I went ahead and moved to Pittsburgh.

But then, when my ex-wife was partway through planning her own move, suddenly things were up in the air again:  her fiancé had a serious job prospect open up in Chicago, an opportunity worth a lot more money.  Everything went on hold while he went to interview after interview, and agonized over the choice for weeks.  Depending on his decision, my children might end up a day’s drive away from me.

By this time my relationship with Ali had become very serious indeed.  If my children moved to Chicago, there was no question that I would need to be near them.  But, unless Alison came to Chicago as well, I’d be a broken man.

Fortunately I didn’t have to choose:  the job in Chicago didn’t work out, and now all of us are living happily in Pittsburgh.  But for me it was a tense time, in which I thought a lot about the different kinds of bonds between people.

The bond between a parent and young child is extremely strong — stronger than any other bond in the world, I think; and yet we call it “love”, the same word we use for the relationship between, well, “lovers”.  In one way, it is not the same kind of thing at all.  In another way, they’re very similar.

Let me try to explain…

The Inner Landscape

A central part of my spiritual religious practice is meditation, particularly visualization.  I use a technique common to many religious traditions, in which I relax and concentrate on visualizing natural scenes, cultivating a sort of ‘inner landscape’.  In this landscape I work with images and symbols, much as one works with dreams or subconscious symbols in psychoanalysis.  The practice is extremely valuable for me, giving me essential information about my own psychological makeup and inner life, as well as hints of divine intention.

For example, at one point while I was still married, my ex-wife was involved in a potentially fatal car accident, and for months afterwards I suffered from nearly uncontrollable attacks of fear and panic.  Visualizations of the flights of eagles, meeting with guides and gods, and climbing out of an abyss helped me regain my composure and dig out the roots of the problem.  Later, while I was going through the breakup and separation that led to my divorce, visualizations of crawling up mountains and negotiations with agents of change helped me adopt a healthy emotional attitude, to feel supported and guided through the process.  Even later, visualizations involving Death and fire in water helped me find my emotional footing while I was negotiating a new relationship, a new city, and a new job.

I should make it clear that these visualization meditations are not the same as daydreaming or writing.  It’s a creative process, but one in which the subconscious is engaged as directly as possible.  Generally you start with some idea of a setting — a garden, a beach, a forest — and once it is firmly established in your imagination, you allow things to happen, or guides to appear, or follow impulses to wander or explore.  The images, guides, and impulses are messages from your subconscious, or even deeper influences.

After exploring my inner landscape for a few years — its forests, pools, beaches, and mountains — I began to recognize patterns in its geography.  For example, it had four edges, roughly speaking:  an abyss, a desert, mountains, and the sea; and these four corresponded to the four classical elements:  air, fire, earth, and water.  Near the center, in a place where I usually began my meditations, there was a pair of small hills, each with a temple on top of it; and between them was an amphitheater, a broad open valley and garden.  For me, this area was a sort of axis mundi, a world axis, in which the entire world was reflected and centered.

The Place of Love and the Other

Near one of those temples is a forest which I think of as the Forest of the Branching Paths, a mostly oak and beech forest with paths that cross and branch endlessly.  There are many people wandering in this forest; some are friendly, some are not.  Because of the shadows of the forest, and the tendency of people to wear heavy cloaks and hoods, it is often hard to see who you are talking with, or get a clear idea of their expressions or intent.

I often come to this forest when I want to gain some insight into people in my life.  For many of us, life is a lot like this forest; and I think in some ways the forest represents our physical or social experiences on earth.  In fact, some areas of the forest seem to be especially associated with certain people I know well.

Outside the forest, on the slopes of the hill not far from one of the temples, is an area associated with Alison.  The hillside is green and lush and grassy, and there is a stone Celtic cross standing in the turf.  It’s a place you could lie down in and spend the whole day watching the sun and clouds go by.  Once or twice I have come here in meditation to get a clearer sense of what is going on in our relationship.  I feel almost as if this is a place where Alison’s inner landscape touches my own; as if it is an area where our minds and hearts meet, in some sense.

Other times, when I reach out to Alison in meditation, I find she is right there with me, wherever I happen to be in the landscape — as if she and I are not separate people at all, but somehow shadows of each other, or overlapping individuals.

Things are very different, however, when I meditate on my children, or my parents.  When I go into meditation and think of them, my thoughts are drawn to the hills themselves, the twists and turns of the landscape, the patterns of vegetation and temperature.  In some way I feel as if my children and parents determine the very foundational geography of my inner landscape.  They never appear as symbols in meditation, but they are pervasive, integrated into everything.

Blood and Water, Air and Breath, Stone and Bone

I honestly don’t know why there’s such a difference in the way Alison and my children appear in meditation.  It might be because my children are blood relations; or it might be because I’ve known my children longer.  And I don’t know whether this difference would hold true of everyone, or is just a quirk of my own personal ‘landscape’.

But there is a clue here, I think, to why it is we use the same word, ‘love’, for these relationships that are so profoundly different.  Because whether, in the case of Alison, I am semi-physically linked like a shadow, or, in the case of my children, my paths are constrained by the shape and character of the landscape, these relationships help to define my very sense of self.  My four children are a fact about who I am, just as my partnership with Alison is.  I may change my coat, my haircut, my house, or my job, and that does not change who I think I am.  But a loss of these relationships would break me.

In other words, these relationships are an essential part of the scaffolding upon which I am building my life.  If I lost my children, I know that whole continents in my inner landscape would change (just as, when my marriage ended, a mountain collapsed).  If I lost Alison, the grassy hillside would become bare, and more profoundly, I could not reach out in meditation and find her there beside me and within me, closer than skin.  This, I think, is love, in blood or in water:  living in a landscape that is not yours alone.

Similar Posts

• The Upper Airs: Layers of Landscapes in Meditation
• Eyrie of the Garuda: Meditation on Changing Relationships
• Mapping the Inner Landscape
• The Bear: Downloadable Guided Meditation for Security, Abundance, and Rebirth
• Zen and the Art of Tarot II: Meditation and Release
• Feather, Stone, and Light: Meditation Interlude
• Merry Meetings: Guest Post on the Meet a Guide Meditation