The earth gives us energy. It’s up to us to receive it, and to honor it with ceremony.

What makes a place so special that humans feel the energy and notice the power? What is it that draws us in, opens us up, lets us access wisdom and spiritual reverence not normally available to us?

We can look to our own ancestors/indigenous peoples for guidance. They responded to landscape: mountain, river, butte in the middle of the plains. They listened to earth energies, locating places of unusual physical magnetism and remarkable geologic formation that represented places of power. At such places, some civilizations made simple cairns or paintings to honor the sacred, as at Ayers Rock in Australia and Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. Other civilizations built amazing structures, as at Machu Picchu and Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley in Peru; the Potala Palace in Tibet; and Chartres, St. Peters, and Teotihuacán on older Neolithic and pagan sacred sites. What’s remarkable about all these places is the very long use, by successive cultures, augmenting and building the energy and power of place with reverence, ceremony, and relationship.

We westerners, and especially we Americans, need to find and create sacred places in our own backyards. Our ancestors and all indigenous people saw the “center” as right where they lived. If we learn the sacred in our own bioregions, feed it, and let it feed us, we sustain both ourselves and our earth.

Honoring the Sacred Where We Live

I often sit at the top of a small hill in the oak woodlands above my house, looking south down Sonoma Valley and the San Francisco Bay, west up Sonoma Mountain, east to the Mayacamas Mountains. It is, as you can imagine, a wondrous and beautiful landscape. Before ownership, my tribe or band would have gathered in a place like this, or on top of the mountain (now owned, fenced, and not accessible).

I’ve been guided to create a medicine wheel on this hill. I am told the wheel is for gathering people, for visioning, and for creating a sacred place where we can explore personal and collective “dreaming,” as the Aboriginals call it. It feels like the old way, creating a “sacred hoop” of people, earth, and spirit.

Creating the Wheel

I began by carrying stones up the hill, and then more stones. I asked for guidance: what should the medicine wheel look like, how should I use it, what ceremonies were needed? Learning with my apprentice to read my grandfather’s old brass compass, we laid the cardinal points of the wheel and began to construct the inner circle. Then, from sleep, I woke to feel powerful energy rising and pulsing from the wheel. An energetic portal, or vortex, emerged from the center of the wheel.

When we find an opening like this, it is easier to access other dimensions and move outside the space-time continuum. We may be able to “see” back in time, or feel emotions held by the earth from long-ago events. A simple meditation may take us into deep knowing. The reverence we feel at sacred sites around the world comes from this energetic component; the stronger a site’s continuous use, the easier it is to feel the power.

So, with this medicine wheel, I invite others to make the sacred communal: to join together for ceremony, to celebrate the seasons in an ongoing way in the circle. Our reverence and ceremony will help us work with the mountain’s energy, and build it over time; combining our human and earth energies to nudge our collective destiny will exponentially strengthen the power of our intent.

For those of you who are not local (our subscribers live on four continents), it’s my hope that you can use these ideas and insights about sacred place to find and create your own, to draw in your own communities. Notice a beautiful and unusual landscape. Develop a deep relationship with the land. Spend time in the space, experiencing quiet, open, undisturbed peace; rest in the sounds of whistling bird wings, leaves shuffling in the wind, bees searching for nectar; let your body sink into the earth. Make offerings. Let the land become sacred to your heart.

We cannot survive these challenging times without the sustenance of others, shared spirit, shared values, shared ceremony, shared earth. As the Hopis say, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”