So many times when people talk about sacred places what they mean are buildings or the remains of buildings or structures that human beings have made. Usually for the purpose of connecting with the sacred or so we assume depending on the age of the structure. We can’t really know with things like the Serpent Mound in Ohio or the Cerne Abbas Man in Dorset, England because the culture that produced them no longer exists and the myths or tales about them have disappeared. With ancient structures we attempt to figure out their meaning from what remains, but in the end we simply guess and put our own meanings on them, most often making them mysterious and hinting at sacred purposes stemming from impossible to discover secret societies or religious groups.
But the sacred is not owned, controlled by or even created by humans. The structures and forms we create can connect with it bringing the sacred here into the physical, but as we are all the stuff of stars, everything is sacred and connecting with the numinous is not the sole purview of bipeds. Sacred place can be found all around us in nature. Groves, mountains, caverns, springs, rivers, lakes, fields, cliffs, all hold sacred spaces which are available to all creatures. Such sacred spaces allow people the ability to access the numinous in the opposite perspective from religious structures. Men, through buildings, monuments, and temples, attempt to convey the feeling of eternity, universality and the yearning for immortality through monumental structures soaring high above our heads built from seemingly indestructible materials.
Sacred places in nature allows us to truly feel this without the need for artifice or symbolism. They also allow us to feel at once small and insignificant while being interconnected. They allow us to drop the masks of society and culture, the structures that we live within to make sense of our reality, and to reset our boundaries to a more expansive level opening ourselves to possibilities, to wonder, to deep connection, and thoughts of our origins and new directions for living. Sacred places give us the gift of insight into our beingness unobstructed by other’s opinions, message, or constructs. It’s worth spending some time in a place without message in order to hear our own hearts. We are, after all, made from the stuff of stars….
