The speaking places

For me, walking through an oak savanna is like entering another reality. 

A heightened, heart-expanding reality, where every being, gesture, movement or sound seems to carry a significance beyond my power to fully understand or express. 

Come, the oaks call me, before winter is here. 

Always, as I encounter these places that speak so deeply to me, I get a sense that I am walking into an ancient story being told. Witnessing a centuries-old conversation among beings whose sheer presence is so immense it is almost palpable. 

What is it all about, that shift in consciousness? It feels like moving from a reality that feels flat into one with a vast sense of depth and space...as if I am walking into the original template of this world — an archetype, or symbolic landscape, of the unconscious. 

There is a sense of past and present, suspended, existing as one.

A sense of being one small piece of this place's eternal and mysterious unfolding.

A sense of being invited into a way of knowing and being without thought.

A sense of being loved. 

See the diverse ways they gesture and express themselves: each akin, yet unique. 

This is strong magic: the power of a speaking place. 

To sense the sacredness of another, we must carry the sacred within ourselves. Otherwise, how would we recognize it with such certainty? As within, so without.

Here, the fading embers of my spirit rekindle. Circular thoughts unknot, inner monologues cease. 

I rest, my whole being awakening to the beloved Earth above me, below me, around me, encircling me.  

John O'Donohue wrote, "The shape of a landscape is an ancient and silent form of consciousness...The earth is full of soul." 

He also wrote, "The silence of landscape conceals vast presence." 

Yes. And the silence of landscape also reveals vast presence; because the silence itself is a kind of voice. 

One we cannot hear with our ears, but sense with our souls.