Open Sky Open Mind:
A Year Long Pilgrimage Through the Seasons
- by Cazeaux Nordstrum
Legend has it that on a cold night in the Pyrenees, Charlemagne dreamt a great voice foretold of his travel across the Milky Way. He awoke, looked up to the stars and knew he must follow them. He would make the journey on foot across the Milky Way to Santiago. Such is the beginning of the legend of the pilgrimage known as the Camino de Santiago.
El Camino de Santiago is one of the most widely known pilgrimages although the earth is filled with walkabouts of meaning and intention. A transformation is sought, a healing, a vision if you will, from walking the path of a pilgrim. A pilgrimage ties us to history, to spiritual practices and intimately to the earth.
I grew up in the Southwest when the towns were small, and the ranch lands were large. There was nothing but wide-open space. It was a time when the cultures of indigenous peoples lived close to their ways and their beliefs. The two lane road from Tucson to Nogales was marked with shrines on the side in the dirt marking lost lives on the stretch between the US and Mexico. There were shrines at various places in the town. Places to notice the Mother Mary or Jesus or a Saint. Wooden, rock built, simple yet sacred reminders to pray along the way. Reminders to notice our path while walking it.
A few years ago several friends planned walking Le Chemin de St Jacques, the French side of El Camino de Santiago in Spain. As the dates grew closer and the requirements of daily walking for several weeks, speaking French, and the quest cameto the foreground, the trip fell apart. But three of us decided instead to pursue a different sort of pilgrimage:circumnavigating Corsica by camping around the island. In the majority of places we were the only Americans. A sense of the spiritual happened by virtue of the pared down living, camping close to the land and to the sea, speaking other languages and meeting our neighbors, the Corsicans and other Europeans on holiday. We lived so simply, near the water of the Mediterranean, moving every few days to another sought after location of spacious stillness.
In creating the yearlong format for Open Sky Open Mind, Scott Eberle and I wanted to offer a School of Lost Borders program that would allow pilgrims the benefit of their own experience in nature,across an entire year. We wanted to offer a deeper understanding of the true spiritual value of being in nature. Whether this journey is known as a pilgrimage, spiritual quest or walkabout, all are pathways for contemplation.
Open Sky Open Mind invited each quester to identify his/her own spiritual beliefs and practices with no boundary other than the definition of the questers themselves. These credos were shared at the first gathering in January 2013. Paths practiced by group members include Zen, Vipassana and Tibetan Buddhism, Qigong, Yoga, Nature and Animal Tracking, Devotional Practices to the Dark Madonna, Contemplative Prayer, the Spiritual Essence of Nature, and, Wilderness Fasting.
The Open Sky clan met in all four seasons in different parts of the San Francisco Bay Area utilizing state parks, private property, federal lands, nature preserves-some with overnight lodging, mostly not. Moving about on the land, the spiritual dimensions and the practical concerns of pilgrims go hand in hand, and so the sacredness of the earth was discovered with each new location. Additionally, the pilgrims served as mirrors for each other, each coming to be seen by others as being sacred, an embodiment of the transpersonal.
Our first weekend together was in early spring high up in the rolling hills of the northern Bay Area. The cold was so bitter that our morning meditation/contemplative prayer time to be synchronized with the rising sun was set aside in favor of staying warm and sane. Stories from the daylong walks in solitude revealed the mirror of what was awakening in nature...slowly coming to bud and to movement. A summer retreat in Sonoma County found us camping nearby several young families with small children, the children providing us a background of splashing in the nearby creek, giggling, happy to be in the newness of the fragrant flowers of early spring. Cold icy rains initiated us through the Fall Equinox at Henry Coe. Arriving unexpectedly at night tents flooded, gear found mud caked; tarps set up only to have the wind take off with them. As we approach our last time together at the end of January 2014 in mid-winter we ask what has died in order to be reborn and what is still in hibernation for renewal in the spring. And the Open Sky Open Mind circle closes its year of formal practice, with the option of the group carrying on without us.
In between our times together, the Open Skyers were held together by an e-council. Each person had a time slot with talking piece to check in with the season as the theme. In one year's time we celebrated the births of new babies, death of a mother, death of a father, a marriage and a civil union, dissolution of marriages, serious illnesses, surgeries, caregiving those we love, relocating, applying to graduate school, traveling to far away places, unfolding of new careers, new found places within ourselves, stepping into elder hood, getting lost (and found) in geography and in landscape of self-identity.
Open Sky Open Mind is a spiritual quest,not for religion, but for discovering the essence of living and dying. It is being on the land that awakens truth. It is a period of contemplation if you will. It is spending time in nature where the evidence of truth is everywhere. People at their core remain attracted to the mystery, power and sanctity of special locations such as waterfalls, mountains, and trees.
As the yearlong pilgrimage of Open Sky Open Mind comes to a close, we are reminded of the intention of its offering, which was to provide ordinary people the chance to be pilgrims. Why? Because of all the spiritual traditions, nothing opens us more than regular time spent in the solitude and silence found in nature. This is the place, this is the combination, this is the invitation for the ego identity to drop away, along with all the explanations. What remains is spaciousness for the heart and mind to see how things really are. It is the capacity for a larger seeing.
Open Sky Open Mind: A Year Long Pilgrimage Through the Seasons is the sister program to Open Desert Open Mind, a nine day retreat to beheld in Death Valley this coming November.
