Mountain

The word for today is MOUNTAIN. If I'm feeling positive I'll think of the strength and energy of a MOUNTAIN; if I'm feeling negative I'll think of a MOUNTAIN of trouble. Today I'm feeling positive.

MOUNTAINS, according to the science of geomancy, are places of great power. I was reminded of this when I was in NYC two weeks ago at a lecture about Buddhist monasteries in Buryatia, a former Soviet republic in eastern Siberia. A professor from Tulane University, William Brumfield, showed slides of monasteries that had survived the vast destruction of Stalin's rule. The monasteries were built within view of the Sayany MOUNTAINS. The monasteries and the monks who lived there drew from the MOUNTAINS' power.

In Chicago we do not have MOUNTAINS, but we do have a great lake, which according to geomancy, is also a source of power. I do not know how far we have to travel to find a MOUNTAIN, since I do not know when a hill becomes more than a hill, when it graduates to mountainhood. About a year and a half ago I drove north through Wisconsin and purposely stopped at the location of highest elevation in the state. There was a water tower at the top and a bit of a view; it was really easy to climb.

Back East, where I come from, there are MOUNTAINS. There are the White Mountains in New Hampshire, which include the presidentials, there is Mt. Katahdin in Maine, which is the beginning of the Appalachian trail. In NY there are the Catskill Mountains and the Adirondacks; in New Jersey the Palisades. In western Massachusetts, where I went to college, there is the Holyoke Range. I could sit on Memorial Hill almost any fall afternoon in Amherst and gaze at its gentle glory.

When I still lived in Maine, my young nieces, who are native Midwesterners, walked with me on the rocks besides the ocean in Cape Elizabeth. These are MOUNTAINS, the oldest one said, as we walked along the trails of wildflowers and berries that bordered the sea. No, no this is not a MOUNTAIN I told her and I laughed to myself at her lack of perspective. I had not lived in the flatness at that point in my life, the flatness was still to come.

As a child I drove with my family up the Taconic State Parkway to visit my great aunt who had a home in the Catskills. She owned over a 100 acres of property. She had inherited the land from her second husband; her third husband had built a stone wall along the roadside, stone pillars to mark the driveway, and a manmade pond from a stream behind the house. My great aunt rode a tractor to clear acres of lawn from which we could look out to other slopes of the MOUNTAINS. At dusk we saw deer, at night we saw stars that I never knew existed in my suburban experience. I felt the power and the peace of the MOUNTAINS; I smelled the freshness of pine, heard the cooing of owls or the brief snapping sounds of a fireflies.

When my great aunt grew old, unable to live alone in the MOUNTAINS, she moved to an apartment on 68th and Lexington in Manhattan. She moved her antique collection, her armoire, her figurines, what remained of her jewelry after several robberies. Unfortunately, when she moved, there was construction on a building across the street. The peace of the MOUNTAINS was replaced by drills and jackhammers. After several years in Manhattan, my aunt moved again, to a retirement community in Connecticut, but I believe that her peace was permanently destroyed by those years living amidst the pollution and noise of NYC, a city where buildings tried to replace MOUNTAINS, and they simply could not.


ADDENDUM: I first heard the word geomancy several years ago when I learned that someone I had met at my network chiropractor's office wanted to start a practice. She helped people situate and arrange their homes to align with the power of the earth. She made several trips to Scotland to study at a geomancy school. Later she considered attending a "green" architecture program at a university here in the US, but I don't think she ever did. Geomancy refers to a practice of divining the patterns of scattered pebbles, sand and seeds. Another use of the term (the one I am more familiar with) refers to the Chinese practice of Feng-shui, which is the use of landscape and topography to determine the optimal location for buildings and human energy. Geomancy is thousands of years old and was used in both Islamic and Buddhist cultures.