The Cosmos In Lady Manzanita: process and the Great Paradox

On the land between two lakes, just south of the centre of Cortes Island there is a park called Kw’as. The road wraps around the northwest side and takes not long to pass by. There is a small parking lot with a great big signs, a map, and a bucket of handmade walking sticks.

The trees are big, and occasionally cars rest in the parking lot; otherwise the park is somewhat nondescript from the roadside. As the road wraps around, the land comes to rest at the edge of little Gunflint Lake, opal in shape and energy. For a couple of hundred meters the road runs right along the lake, affording beautiful views of moon reflections, simple shorelines, and the thriving forests of Kw’as.

I lived on the other side of this lake on a 300 acre land trust home to the Linnaea Garden program. From the Linnaea farmhouse there was a trail that headed down through the orchard, and up the hill towards Cortes Bay. At the crest of the hill, a much smaller path crossed. Going left, the trail climbs up to the dome of views known as Easter Bluff; by banking right, the trail skitters along a steep side, ducking down through a huge stand of second growth, and then either cross into Kw’as or up into town. (What wondrous land that one can still walk distances through forests!).

The ridge is finger of granite, carved by the paths of the ice flows long ago. It is fairly high, harboring huge trees and an incredible diversity of fungi that only makes itself visible only occasionally in a perfect autumn. From the heights, the lake glimmers in sky whites, clear blues, and forest greens.
The spine submerges its nose to allow the water a passage. A handmade bridge of a simple curve spans the pass. The water is a blue necklace, framed in veils of Sweet Gail, detailed with yellow water lilies.

You are standing on a bridge between the two lakes, on an island the ocean, cozy in the Strait of Georgia.

With forests in two directions and lakes front and back there is reflection, repetitions and differences; oftentimes I got the sense of dizziness, of being at the centre of a spiral or of a kaliedescope.

Years ago I sought the word for this sensation, asking what the word was for the sense of vertigo one gets from looking up, but no one could tell me of a single word. Now I know it is a part of axis mundi.

An axis mundi is, as it sounds, an axis of the world. In his 1957 book, The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade described Systems of the World his sense of order of the known world, in four parts. First there is a break in the homogeneity; the sacred becomes visible; there is communication with the cosmos and this forms an axis mundi; surrounding this axis is the known world.

I am not so magnificent in my metaphors as Eliade yet. I see the experience of spirit manifest is a mind-frame, a framework even. It is a choice. ( There are different social locations with different levels of privilege, imbricated in the physical world, limiting choices, and for some survival is priority). The sacred is everywhere, not only in the heavens, it is in every form and pattern. I must agree though that this acknowledgement does so often leads one’s attention up and open to the cosmos in gratious ( is there a connection between grace and gratitide: gracious and gratious?)

I am a child of quantum theory and celebrated that if science measured the wave, they could not measure the particle, and if they measured the particle, they could not measure the wave. I knew that there was more than one way; I know that reality occurred on a number of levels, as I can now see in post-structural theory that articulates how the axis of inquiry affects what and how we see.

After taking my time speak to each of the directions, to ask for help, give gratitude and let go, I would dive into the grand old growth of Kw’as.

Her trees are huge. Western Red Cedar and Douglas Fir grow in a thick duff floor. The trails branch: to the right many trails wind through the gentle lowlands that border Gunflint Lake, sweet and soft in their protection. To the left, the land borders Haigh Lake, an area with more of a tough-love energy, a bit like a bigger sibling.

It is closer to the ocean on the western side: the winds gather strength as they travel up the channel from the southwest, coming over the land, and dancing down into the lake’s open expanse. The feeling is more open and transparent, though almost demanding in that clarity. The forest all along the lake’s edge is laced with the tall silver watchtowers of standing -dead trees, often holding one, or a number of, big bald eagles.

I would head left, using the rope ladder to aid my way up the granite blocks sporting their graffiti of lichen. A thick cloak of moss held in the graceful forms of Arbutus trees, stretching their strength from cracks in the stone to a puff of leaves in the sky. Pine and huckleberry grew here and there on the high and dry; choruses of fir and hemlock grew thick and regal where the water was. The trail ran along the edge of land, say 50m above the lake, affording views of the lakes edge most of the way around: the world is a goddess wearing jewels of sky and full skirts of forest: patterns of stunning beauty.

I arrived on Cortes with all my arrogance and ache. It took a few months before the health of those near exposed me to my own set of defenses, how those defenses affected my relationships, how the quality of individual relationships form a community, and how a healthy community is in relationship with the land.

I was forced to accept that I was not all I made myself out to be; I could no longer ignore the things I pretended were not hurting me. In the colloquial, my issues were coming up and I starting working on my sh*t. As I did when I was a child, I went to the forest to shed my tears and work myself out. While the community reflected my health back to me, the forest was free of judgment and expectation.

In all of the healing arts that I have engaged in since, -Process painting, Heller work, 5 Rhythms Dance, Ecstatic Dance, yoga,- as with emergency response, the first step is to find or create a safe place. A place free of danger, expectation and judgment is necessary for a person to begin healing, trusting, and engaging in personal work. (Although recently I heard someone begin with, "I do not believe in safety." And now, to me, that ressonates).

I went to the forest with my shame and my courage to lay myself bare. It judges not, nor rushes me, but patiently and supportively listens. It does not take it on, take it personally, or hold it against me. I offered up my pain to get composted back in the food chain, letting Earth have all that energy back, trusting that I will receive everything I need. At times I felt the forest loud and jubilant in its support of me, singing as a gospel chorus in a southern church rejoicing a miracle, and bursting forth in praise of creation.

I began to shed my illusion.

I began to open myself up to darkness as a teacher, to my imperfections becoming my strengths. I worked to reroute thought patterns, and untangle my skeleton back to litheness. In my steps, in my breaths, in my cells, I began to accept and cleanse each fiber of me, and began to rebuild my relationships. I worked to get back into my body, and into the present. More of the forest and less of me, I breathed the forest in and everything I did not need out. I remembered that the forest needs my healthiness too. I tried to be aware of all the levels of life occurring concurrently, and to be a healthy vortex of energy moving through it.

The process of healing and the practice of religion stem from the same root. The word ‘healing’, and the world ‘holy’ are both rooted in the word ‘whole’, coming from the German halig. To be whole denotes connection, relationship, and integration. In health, all parts of ourselves are integrated, and we are intimately integrated with our landbase. We exist in various dimensions concurrently, -the mental, emotional, financial, romantic, physical and cosmic; I began to see integrity as being able to move through all of these levels gracefully and without fracture, without losing parts of myself to panic and doubt. Both healing and the great wisdom traditions work to cultivate this harmony of the microcosm to the macrocosm, within each person, and for the greater good.

Micea Eliade begins with saying that sacred space is a defined space. My initial reaction to this was to argue and think that sacred space is wherever I want it to be. When we spoke in groups, after watching Joseph Cambell, a number of people expressed the notion that they felt the sacred could be anywhere, in anything, anytime. As I think more about Kw’as Park I see that it does have boundaries and it has signs that point to it. Cortes Island also has a very distinct boundary, and it is a place rich with the sacred.

I participated in a ten-day shaman workshop at Hollyhock, on the island: two people led the session, and another two acted as vessel keepers; we did a lot of personal work there, and there was a clear ritual for entering and exiting the space. I can see the importance of a clearly defined space for creating safety necessary for personal journeys into the sacred. Still, I think the sacred can be found anywhere and does exist within us all the time. It makes sense then a clear sense of one’s boundaries is important.

Eliade said that sacred place constituted a break in the homogeneity of space. I have heard this idea recently from a Belgian philosopher Leiven De Couter, who was speaking of heterotopia back to Aristotle and the Agora, to Foucault and the present, at the school of architecture. De Couter was extolling the need for heterotopia in the modern landscape as a place to check your head, get perspective, reconnect, just sit, to have a spacial ‘Sunday’. In becoming whole again we need the time, space, and perspective to help open our perceptions. In the repetitions of daily life it is easy to forget the cosmic and the minute, and the infinite interconnections. Sacred space and heterotopia function offer us a break from the banality and a safe seat from which to stare with our eyes closed.

So often in the depths of things there appears to be contradiction. This can cause tension;I think it lies at the root of binary thinking; it can appear as hypocrisy. But deeper yet is yin-yang where both are true equally. I have taken to calling this The Great Paradox, short-handing it into my book margins as ‘tGP!’. The idea of paradox is built into the creation myths of the Keres people of North America as Paula Gunn Allen tells in her book Cosmogyny; “They were two, but they were the same thing”(35); “They were the song and the mystery. All of it and only a small piece of it”(36). Beyond the binary, or duality, there is the great paradox, which is the creative matrix from which possibility is continually generated. Rudolf Otto spoke of the paradox of transcendence and immanence, leading to a third concept: that of the numinous.

And perhaps it is here that I should return to Kw’as park.

At the point along the lakeshore furthest from either of the trailheads, the trail drops down to touch the water. Not far from the lakes edge, in its own patch of clear, grows a Manzanita tree. She rises in one smooth flowing and twisting trunk, leafing out above head height, driving her roots between the cracks in the granite. Her skin is plum colored and matte, almost as though spun of the finest velvet.

I stopped when I saw her, paused in the stillness. Touching her, I melted into her smoothness and strength. I put my ear to her, and I heard the cool silence of the infinite cosmos. I listened. I heard the great Emptiness, the great void: the everything and the nothing. I could hear the cosmos in her and in me. I knew that we are all made of patterns. I felt the great paradox, simultaneously single and multiplicitous.

I gave thanks and back I ran. Back over the big rocks, along the blueberry bushes, over the trunks and roots, past the eagles and down the rope-run cliff-chunk back to the bridge where the four directions converge with wind and water.

I walked the park many times, opening myself away from negative patterns, singing with trees, guided by birds. I met Lady Manzanita only that once, in my last journey through the park from Linnaea. I was smitten with her then; I had a crush on her; I was enamored, and dreamt of returning to become her disciple. At that very same time, I met a man who could meet with clear depth and openness. We spent a week on the floor, staring into each other’s eyes, and then agreed to marry. I did not return to see Lady Manzanita, but she remains clear in my memory, and I know she remains clear in herself, rooted in granite on the shores of a lake, on an island, cozy in the Strait of Georgia.