The Trails on Chinook lands have long been a sacred meander upon which Spirit invites humans to dance with the more-than-human world. Even though a few years have passed since my last visit, I vividly remember certain places along the trail. There is the shadowy mound where vivid Chanterelle mushrooms push up through pine needle duff, each year, in their season. In my mind's eye, I can also see the mystical stand of bamboo cloistered in the wetlands. I recall the tree rooted below the Wetlands trail where I met a Barred Owl face to face, each watching the other with mindful intensity. I savor the places I count on for Blackberries and Salmonberries, and where deer often linger with watchful timidity.
But, for me, the thinnest and most-holy place along the trails is the S.E. corner of the Sky Loop; at the highest elevation along that part of the path. It is where plump Huckleberries ripen in filtered sunlight and maternal rain. It is a land where swaying trees play whispered music on the wind, like a bow pulled across taught strings; where wind-felled timbers criss-cross each other, their decay releasing nutrients back into the soil.
Also there, on that high, open corner of anotherwise wooded pathway, a small cairn keeps a silent watch. If it is not completely scattered by wild creatures, storms, and curious hikers, it is a small mound of stone I've referred to in my own mind as the "Cairn of the Gathering." For many years I would pick up small stones from each body of water I visited; rivers, lakes, oceans. Back to that very small cairn I would bring these stones on each visit to the Sky Loop. In that place there are stones from Canada, Alaska, Montana, Scotland, the East and West and Gulf coasts, Oregon and Washington, Indiana and Wisconsin, and many other places as well.
Each time I visit I tend the scattering mound, gathering it up again, adding a few more pebbles. On each visit with the Cairn Of Gathering, I also gather my own thoughts, allow Spirit to gather me in to something greather than myself, be reminded that each of those stones were originally held in community by the life-giving waterways that linked them. I take time to consider how Whidbey Institute is a place of gathering for those who seek to move deeper into life and wisdom and hope. It is a place to embrace wild things and love the earth; to live into community with Spring's first innocent buds, Summer's plump sensual fruit, Autumn's sighing decay of Arboreal giants, and Winter's full ferocity of darkness. It is a place to be in wildness, beyond the exhausting pace of human fear. It is a place to sit on the soft ground, and breathe, and be.
For me, that little high corner of the Sky Loop Trail is a place as sacred as any cathedral made by human hand. For, in that place, I always seem to find myself drawn by earth's flirtatious beckoning, toward something, both, marvelously dangerous and deeply holy.
