I Found My Essential Places
And learned they are necessary to my well-being.
I am thinking about how I connect to different places that I have been and seen and wondering why some impact me so much more deeply than others. It is not necessarily a matter of beauty, because I have seen some amazingly beautiful vistas of mountains or waterfalls that make me say “Ah, yes, gorgeous” or literally “awesome” but don’t especially stun me with a deeper emotional reaction.
I have decided that the places that touch me in more meaningful ways do so because they speak to me on a spiritual plane. Somehow those places feel touched by a Mystery with a capital M. Somehow they feel sacred.
I need to feel a connection to that sense of wonder and the sacred in order to heal the little wounds inflicted by living cheek-by-jowl with too many people, in urban density. To heal the thousand little paper cuts that everyday life deals out, the stresses of traffic, phones ringing and beeping, and media noise. I need to fill myself up with quiet, regularly. I need to make my soul sit up, take notice, listen deeply, and be refreshed. The older I grow, the more I find I need this.
There are two places in particular that have the power to stun not only my senses but my soul. One of those is Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, in the wide-open spaces of Montana, described by the National Park Service in this manner (click on the quotation to visit the NPS website).
The second place, the North Shore of Lake Superior, is quite different in nature and covers more area, running for miles along the northern shore of the Great Lake and up into the hills and woods that rise from the shore of Lake Superior all the way to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA).
I could not begin to tell you the source of what makes these places feel sacred, but I experience them as what others have described as open-air cathedrals. Perhaps it is the sense of deep time and the passage of many human souls there before me, those reaching far back into pre-history. Deep time and simultaneously, time outside of time. The heart of nature beating slowly.
I have visited the North Shore many times. It is more accessible to me, living in the Upper Midwest. So, let’s go there first, as I tell you about one trip that felt especially impactful seven years ago.
We celebrated my husband’s October birthday with a trip Up North. What an amazing weekend. Perfect weather. Beauty surrounding us. Fall colors. Oh, and lots and lots of traffic. We saw more people at BWCA jumping-off spots to begin their canoe trips into the watery wilderness than we expected so relatively late in the season.
I don’t know if I would thrive if I lived too far from Lake Superior and the North Shore, the north woods. I’m not even an active outdoorswoman. Not a hiker or hunter, not a kayaker or canoer. But I still need to be immersed in nature, specifically Up North, at least once a year. To wake up and nourish my soul, as I said earlier.
Though I don’t “DO” much, I excel at “BEING” there. I soak in the beauty through my eyes, my ears, my sense of smell and even my skin. I listen to the wind making the quaking aspens rattle, feel the cool on my skin. I hear the lake shore wave action. I see the colors and the light, the skies and the waters. I go back up into the North Woods on narrow back roads and see not only trees, but many smaller lakes and the small rivers that feed them.
As the saying goes, “God is in the details,” and it is these details that grab me. This time of year the changing leaves, the beautiful colors of grasses and cattails, the dense green pine spires back-lit by yellow birch and aspen. The fall light slanting through the trees, throwing shadows over the roads.
The mystery of the dense stands of forests where the dark rules even at noonday. The sound and sight of birds. Water, trickling down basalt rock faces, rushing over in falls and spills of rivers, or standing quiet in the bogs, washing rocks in the lake shallows, and running up on shorelines. The waters still my spirit into silent wonder.
I leave the city tense and with little frown furrows on my forehead and I return (always so reluctantly) with a spirit calmed and filled up again with the beauty that gives me serenity.
The other place that has surprised me with how instantly and deeply it reached inside of me is the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. I would not have expected that of a battlefield, the essential proof of man’s violence towards man. But there is an inscription on the building that greets you as you enter, a quote from Black Elk, “Know the Power that is Peace.” I don’t believe I could ever say it better. I only visited it once in my lifetime, but the surprisingly intense memory has never faded.
It is the site of Custer’s Last Stand and there are sites of consecrated ground there, as it contains an actual cemetery. But it was not the cemetery per se that touched me with a sense of the Sacred. Rather it was the land itself.
I toured the museum and was impressed, but it was when I stepped outside the back veranda of the museum and found a bench to rest on while my husband hiked, that the power of the place hit me fully. I was so caught up in the moment that it never occurred to me to try to get a photo, but the picture below gives some sense of the wide, rather empty expanse and rolling curves of the high grass fields I saw there.
That is where I felt the Power that is Peace. Sitting quietly, gazing out over the limitless land. I sat and let myself absorb. Felt the almost never-ending wind, the sun, the solidity of the ground that fell away in rolling vistas toward the distant blue horizon. The grasses that danced with the wind in beautiful waves like a brown and lacy ocean. The silence. The utter silence. My soul rested there.
No, it was not about the cemetery exactly, mostly white soldiers, although increasingly a project is moving ahead to find and mark the spots where Lakota and Cheyenne people fell in the battle. The cemetery and the Monument honor people on both sides who struggled over this land which endures far beyond any human lifespan and absorbs them all. And while it provides a sense, quite vivid, of all the people who came before to this place, it is not only about the people. And not about one over the other, whether it is the people who lived with and belonged to the land or the people who came to try to conquer the land and its original inhabitants.
No, the Power there at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument rises up from the land and pours down from the sky.
The North Shore has the huge, grand, and overwhelming expanse of Lake Superior. Its immense and deep water is not a solid, welcoming element. It inspires the sort of awe that has its roots in a power that is indifferent to human frailty.
But once I am away from the wide views of Lake Superior, the woods and smaller lakes are welcoming, because the northern forests, trails, small lakes, and rivers all feel more human scale and more homelike. Full of busy wildlife you imagine is there, just out of sight, creating a sense of bustling muffled within the quiet. With easily imagined cozy human spaces in cabins and lodges not far away with the promise of either outdoor bonfires, or indoor fireplaces and warm mugs of comforting drinks.
The contrast is stark between my two happy places. even though both have elements of grandeur. The North Shore has closed-in spaces and open areas framed by edgings of forests. The area of Montana around Little Bighorn Battlefield feels endlessly open and unbounded, and it felt as if Little Bighorn gave me the face of the earth and the dome of the sky. Within them I was made to feel tiny yet held safe in the embrace of both.
These two regions differ too in how accessible they are to me, living in the Upper Midwest. The Little Bighorn Battlefield is a gem of a memory for me, several days’ drive away, so I may never return. But it now lives within me, in a way that will never let me forget it. The North Shore feels like my home away from home and I will visit it as often as possible for as long as I am able, to recharge my batteries and rehydrate my soul.
May you each find your necessary and happy place to keep your mind, body, and soul nourished. And may you be able to visit it often, whether in person or in memory.
