Quotations About
Place that Evoke a Larger Sense of Ourselves
photo by Amy Lenzo
“In the Presence Walkabouts there are moments when we touch the earth and the earth touches us and an alignment happens. My hypothesis is this: As we walk and sit with the Land, we are re-membering and re-awakening an essential aspect of ourselves as human beings. We are remembering the truth that we belong to all of life and to one another. We are reawakening our capacity to listen for the multiple ways in which we may act to support ourselves and the larger communities to which we belong. We are remembering that we are not alone and that this has implications for the choices we make and put into action in our lives.
When we leave the Presence Walkabout the tuning and aligning within us remains. We may invoke the stillness and the quality of listening in our relationships with others in our families and at work. It is available to us at any time.”
~ Glenna Gerard, Living Presence newsletter, April 2009
.oOo.
“Service to the whole remains the motivating driver. To
me, this means to each other and the earth, for the highest
good of all. It is a transcendent idea that lifts and pushes
use beyond our individual selves. It reminds us to walk and
feel in the shoes (or hoofs or bark) of all life we encounter,
as well as to care for and respect ourselves.”
~ Lisa Paulson,
Voices from a Sacred Land
.oOo.
“What is the life that we discern in things?”
~ Christopher Alexander, Luminous Ground
.oOo.
“If diverse communities of people are going to envision
a more sustainable future and then co-create viable and innovative
strategies for getting there, they must first see themselves
as being inextricably connected to one another and to the
natural environment”
~ Myriam Laberge and Ann Svendsen, Co-Creative
Power: Engaging Stakeholder Networks for Learning and Innovation
.oOo.
“Experience of self is profoundly connected with the existence
of life in buildings and in our surroundings.”
~ Christopher
Alexander, Luminous Ground
.oOo.
“Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion
without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, Eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate us whenever we come into our own power Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free. ”
~Starhawk, Dreaming the Dove
.oOo.
“..a building has life in it to the extent that it awakens
a connection to the personal, a connection to the eternal
vastness which exists before me, and around and after me.
.” ~ Christopher Alexander, Nature of Order, Luminous Ground
.oOo.
“If Gaia is the living planet and is literally the body
of some kind of intelligence, then that intelligence must
have energy centres, and often these coincide with holy places,
whether they’re Mecca, or Ayers rock or Glastonbury.”
~Marion
Bowman, “Drawn to Glastonbury”
.oOo.
“Sacred places are open spaces to which we interact with
the Other. From an ecospiritual standpoint, the Other has
something to teach us and with humility this openness can
be kept in play, yet over time may lead to traditions about
the place. Access points such as mountains and high places
facilitate the generation of insights via visions and unusual
encounters; sacred wells, caves, river canyons may produce
a more ‘depth-directed’ inward encounter which has more to
do with the rootedness of self and one’s society.”
~Adrian
J. Ivakhiv, Claiming Sacred Ground
.oOo.
“Every place is given its character by certain patterns
of events that keep on happening there…The more living patterns
there are in a place—a room, a building or a town—the more
it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more
it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without
a name.”
~Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
.oOo.
“Each of us has an eternal self—a best self—an “I” that
goes beyond what we normally see. This is what allows us
to contact the “living centers” in ourselves, in others,
and in spaces that come alive for us. This field of centers,
that appears in things, people, events, places shows us our interconnectedness…and can be called God or Spirit manifest. Everything we do and make, then, is a gift to IT. Good things grow and unfold out of our understood wholeness.”
~Christopher Alexander, Luminous Ground
.oOo.
“Geomancy is commonly known as t he “art of harmonious placement,”
for it has been used to find the right time and place for
all human activities.”
~Richard feather Anderson, The Power
of Place
.oOo.
“The question of questions for mankind—the problem which
underlies all others, and which is more deeply interesting
than any other—is the ascertainment of the place which Man
occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of
things.”
~Thomas Huxley
.oOo.
“People of the Goddess Danu believe there are a few extraordinary
places on this earth which predispose people to hope, or
especially challenge that hope. Men tend to be ambivalent
about such places precisely because their otherness is frightening
and fascinating…Ireland is one of those places, a sacred
center above the heart of the goddess, Ierne.”
~Morgan Llywellyn,
Bard
.oOo.
“The sorghum-sweet serenity of the place skewered me squarely
for an instant on a knifeblade of nostalgia for the rural
South.”
~William Styron, Sophie’s Choice
.oOo.
“The ancient Greeks sited a shrine at Delphi to honor the
earth Goddess Gaia. Their choice of location was not by chance…The
sages asserted among other things that a mysterious substance
called the “plenum” bubbled up from the ground there in abundance
and that such an abundance favored Gaia and the work of the
priestess oracle, Pithia, to prophesy…Modern psychology and
design have tossed aside such ideas as places of power, but
our bodies and minds still hear their call and respond to
them.”
~James A. Swan, The Power of Place & Human
Environments
.oOo.
“One sits down on a desert sand dune, seeing nothing, hearing
nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams…”What
makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “Is
that somewhere it hides a well.”
~Antoine de St. Exupéry,
The Little Prince
.oOo.
“Grace Cathedral [in San Francisco] is sited on an ancient
Indian sacred place marked by two artesian springs.”
~James
A. Swan, The Power of Place & Human
Environments
.oOo.
“The ancient Egyptians were conscious of the power of place.
Their tombs and temples were located and oriented according
to the geometry of the Earth and heavenly bodies, particularly
the sun. They practiced geomancy, the lore of establishing
buildings in relationship to the forms and energies of the
earth.”
~J. Donald Hughes
.oOo.
“We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon,
the animal, the tree; but the whole of which these are the
shining parts, is in the soul.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
.oOo.
“Just what is a sacred place?…One type is the interior of
a religious building…a second category…involves a specific
site which is called into harmony with the greater whole
through sacred design…such as the solar-lunar laboratory
on Fajada Butte at Chaco Canyon…A third type…may be marked
by some human structures or art work, but derives its sacred
identity from nature itself.”
~James A. Swan, The Power of
Place & Human Environments
.oOo.
“The Himalayas are supremely sacred to more than half a
billion people in South and Central Asia…the source of life-giving
waters.”
~Edwin Bernbaum
.oOo.
“A desert is a place without expectation.”
~Nadine Gordimer
.oOo.
“Humans may assist in the energy balancing and thereby the
healing of Earth by visiting the power points. They may also
benefit from the various Earth spirit energies emanating
from those sites.”
~Martin Gray, “Sacred Sites and Power
Points”
.oOo.
“Geomantic knowledge embraces the geography, the natural
and the human history and the geometric and spiritual dimensions
of a particular place or an area of the earth.”
~Nicholas
Mann, Sedona, Sacred Earth
.oOo.
“Glastonbury (England) is a spiritual volcano wherein the
fire that is at the heart of the British race breaks through
and flames to heaven.”
~Dion Fortune, Glastonbury: Avalon
of the Heart
.oOo.
“And the abrupt mountains, the echoing rock-walled canons,
the sunburnt mesas, the streams bankrupt by their own shylock
sands, the gaunt, brown, treeless plains, the ardent sky,
all harmonize with unearthly unanimity.”
~Charles F. Lumimns,
The Land of Paco Tiempo
.oOo.
“Many of the buttes of the Red Rock Country evoke the qualities
of guardianships, of wise and eternal presences watching
over the land.”
~Nickolas Mann, Sedona, Sacred Earth
.oOo.
“Our Sacred Spirit put us on these Six Sacred Mountains
[the sacred mountains of the Four Corners Area of the American
Southwest]. And the Six Sacred Mountains are not outside
us—they are inside.”
~Katherine Smith Yinishye, Big Mountain
Navajo
.oOo.
“There are spiritual values in mountains.”
~Chief Justice William O. Douglas
.oOo.
“The scalp prickles when we pass a certain ancient doorway;
we shiver, spine-chilled, in such a spot as the ceremonial
cavern at Bandelier; the voice drops to a whisper at Chartres…”
~D. M. Dooling, “Focus,” Parabola 3 Issue 1, 1978
.oOo.
“If Earth has a mind, the keepers of the sacred places have
a very important part to play in aiding the stability and
vitality of humanity’s consciousness, as well as the Earth’s
and their own.”
~James A. Swan, Sacred Places
.oOo.
“There can be no respect for our place in the environment
and the environment’s place in use without a spirituality
that teaches us reverence for the cosmos in which we find
ourselves.”
~Matthew Fox, Wrestling with the Prophets
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