Last weekend, Rumi's Caravan was invited to Fort Bragg. We were beautifully housed, fed, invited into community gatherings, and of course, we spouted some poems in a wonderful venue, the Spirit House for Attitudinal Healing.
Barry and I took advantage of being up north on the coast to spend an additional night in Mendocino. After we got home, this poem came (although the whole weekend was a balm for the soul, not just the way home.)
Returning from Mendocino
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
-Wendell Berry
When the early autumn day
is clear and still;
when the broad Pacific’s waves
crash in towards your toes
and then roll the beach pebbles
back out to sea, hissing and rhythmic
in susurrating whispers;
when you head inland then,
alongside the river’s relentless rush
to the opening ocean;
when arriving at the redwood forest,
you enter the trees’ majestic vigil
as into a ritual;
when you leave the car,
feet crunching fragrant dry needles
on the fern-filled forest floor;
when you rest your forehead and palms
against a rough and fibrous trunk
and feel your kinship;
then you know with no uncertainty
what a privilege it is to be
in places so silent and sacred
that man-made desecration
does not touch them.
Oh, there is the tarred road
and the rude disruption of
a passing car or logging truck,
but the holiness is undiminished,
so vividly alive and vital.
All the earth is sacred,
but some places reveal this truth
so clearly, so compellingly,
that your heart breathes
a sigh of relief, and you offer
a silent prayer of gratitude
for this world,
for this life,
for this magnificence,
for this cleansing
of dispirited and
and weary souls.
