Interview

“Sacred Landscapes” Nature Revisited Podcast, December 21st, 2019

On November 5th I sat down with filmmaker, podcast artist, and gardener Stefan van Noorden of Nature Revisited to record an interview about my path and relationship with sacred landscapes. The following collection of paragraphs is stitched together from those notes.

I hope you recognize something of your own story within these lines.

 Stefan van Noorden:

Welcome to Nature Revisited. We air this episode on December 21st, in celebration of the Winter Solstice. I first met Aleskkya at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science. I was having some trouble with an eagle. We quickly shared with each other the paths we have taken. And through his music, his readings, his poetry, and his photography I have gotten to know someone whose story is a very human one. I have gotten to know someone who embodies the curiosity of the scientist, the creativity of the artist, and the spirit of the mystic.

I

I was born into a military family, my father was in the Navy and we moved frequently.  I was born in Los Angeles, and lived in four places in California, Upland, Ontario and Pomona, and San Diego. Then back and forth on the coasts, Virginia twice, Maryland, Missouri, Kansas, Tennessee, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. And now in Vermont. I lived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, right after the revolution.  I traveled in Italy, Scotland, Guatemala, Peru, and The Amazon as a research scientist there.

I grew up in a very pragmatic environment. Even though I was born an artist I studied science because I had an aptitude for that. Working in conservation was my first career path. But it was soon after I worked for the Conservation Department that I realized the artistic side of me was longing for the company of other artists.  I went in that direction, and never looked back.

I ended up with a plum job in a wonderful town, one of those jobs you can’t imagine would ever happen to you. It had everything.  As a designer I was supporting fifty people, my work was selling coast to coast, over a million and a half dollars a year.  It was a great experience, and I learned a lot. But in the course of doing that I was also having experiences that were of a larger focus as I was being called back by a voice from my life many years ago.

As I grew up I had a sense that I didn’t belong where I was born.  Some of my favorite moments as a little boy were being photographed with Native Americans as we were driving across country in Arizona, New Mexico. When we played Cowboys and Indians in the neighborhood I was always an Indian.  I was a born drummer but I wasn’t allowed to have drums.  My whole life, instead of having rock and roll stars and ’57 Chevy posters on my walls I had posters of Native American holy men; Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Geronimo.  I was attempting to teach myself Lakota from books then and I wrote a song in that language, “Oyate”. As an adult, as a print maker in Santa Fe I had the rare opportunity to work with an original photographic print of Chief Joseph taken by the great documentarian Edward Sheriff Curtis.  I could feel Joseph’s energy still living in that precious silver.

There were other signs.  As a young man my brother and sister and I were visited by a great meteor.  Streaking in above the treetops, it burned up just before us, bursting at last in a flash of apple green, its scent touching us, becoming a part of us.  I wrote a song called “Gavilan” not knowing the word at the time.  Forty years later I would learn it is a Hawk, a great ally to me in my path across all of my days.

All of these things were calling, yet it was as if some part of me had been forgotten and needed to be remembered.  I was carrying the key to a door I wouldn’t recognize for many years yet.

On our long drives across country we would pass the Wáshitá Battlefield in Custer County, Oklahoma and I would think, “I really want to go there” but I didn’t know why.  It wasn’t until I was forty-five years old that at last I stopped and visited, where I had what is called a soul retrieval.  I had come to have a solemn experience, to honor the tragedy of what happened there one hundred and thirty-four years before, but instead what unfolded was a joyful experience.  I arrived just before sunset in late November in a light snow and had the entire area to myself.  As I walked the fields down to the Wáshitá River my spirit began to rise.  As a hawk flew above me I began to run, feeling elated, following after it, the stalks of summer grass and prairie flowers whipping my hands. I followed it all the way back to the parking lot, a half mile, and stepping out of the field and over that rail fence I had a sense that something I had been carrying my whole life fell away at my feet, and the past fell away with it.  That was the beginning of recognition that my connection is real, that this wasn’t just a fantasy as a child, it was a calling.

I had an experience in a river in Texas which can only be described as an intervention.  The river itself was so placid and beautiful nothing could go wrong there, but I ended up dragging myself out of the river naked where the rushing water of a bridge culvert had stripped me of my clothes.

I recognize now that this was a beginning, one where I realized I carried regrets for the many things that I hadn’t done yet.  I began to do everything that I ever wanted to do without delay.  And part of that path was to take me into contact with other cultures; Mayan culture in Guatemala, Peruvian culture in the Amazon, and on to Scotland and the standing stones.  So I began on a path of embracing things that were not in the fore of my mind before but suddenly were very important to me.

In Tennessee I would take time out every day and go walking on mountains and in river valleys where the landscape was very highly charged with old energies, remnants from the Civil War, The Cherokee Trail of Tears, and slavery. Despite all of the modern trappings, those energies still remained there and I was engaging with them.  I had no words for it, and no one to talk to about it.  My daily practice became the beginning of a ten year walking meditation, one where I began to actively work on healing spaces, taking energies on and transforming them.

It was an initiation and a trial by fire.  I had no mentor to guide me.

II

In the standing stones of Scotland there is a sense of connection, a sense of history, a sense of being connected to the whole picture of things. In the Amazon among those trees that are mature and undisturbed, in an area that was a preserve with seven stations of remoteness, the primordial energy was so powerful and life-affirming I couldn’t imagine not being there, it is so essential to our core as human beings.

In Guatemala I was crossing pristine lakes surrounded by volcanoes and all of those massive energies.  The volcano is a masculine energy and the lake is a feminine energy and here they are in perfect harmony.  Those experiences are irreplaceable, and bring with them a sense of belonging.

In the course of my time here in Vermont I have been guided sacred sites.  I believe that they have been in use in the past, that the changes that came to this continent five hundred years ago resulted in the displacement of the people who knew of these places, who peopled these spaces and were honoring them.

The mystic is as much a part of these spaces as any other aspect of them.  When we talk about sacred places, what is a sacred landscape, what is a sacred space, they are located in very highly charged locations of intersection of energetic lines in the landscape. They are also aligned naturally to the auspicious dates of solstices and equinoxes, particularly the Summer Solstice.  When I walked into one of these spaces, following a trail that I was intently focused on, I looked up and could not believe what I was seeing.   But I could feel what it was in my bones.  I would have to wait seven seasons in order to confirm that it was an alignment to the Summer Solstice sunrise, and when I witnessed the light pour into the womb of the space and then cross its altar I already knew that this was a holy place.

I felt the need to create a relationship with this environment and to honor those who had come before, to honor the space again.  I started making offerings of a simple nature.  Sacred herbs, tobacco, cedar, sweetgrass, sage and fruits of the earth.  Fruits and nuts, flowers and seeds, corn and so forth.  And because I was documenting my path into awakening I was carrying a small camera with me.  As an artist I was enthralled with what I was seeing in these spaces, particularly during an alignment when the sunlight pours in through the columns of smoke.  And I was captivated by the images rendered by the lens.

Over time I amassed quite a lot of images.  One day as I was enjoying them again I saw something in the smoke that was a secondary image; an eagle in profile at the top of a column of smoke, its wings raised above its head as it was rising to sky.  In native culture, the eagle is the connection between heaven and earth, the bringer of sight and vision, an emissary of the divine, linking us to everything before us. To my great surprise, there were many such images nested into these photos across several years’ time.  I began to actively search and saw more and more over the course of my time in these spaces.

With time I came to understand that this is not unique, that this is not extraordinary, but that this is part of the language of connection that we as human beings have as our birthright, that the landscape itself is home to spirits of place.  We may assign a lot of names to them but the fact remains that they are part of our lives even if we are not aware of them.  So I was responding to that, and I began to actively respond to seeing this now by preparing offerings that addressed these spaces and their entities on auspicious occasions.  It was as if I was being shown when I was ready to see them.

As a scientist you can imagine all the different ways I have tried to explain this. But I have been doing this long enough now to understand that this is not coincidence, or randomness, or a trick of the mind.  It is convergence.  When we are on our path, when we are living and walking our walk, convergence becomes a part of our everyday lives.  And when it happens in the landscape we are being shown, we are being given access, we are being given a gift.  People have lived this way forever, it is something we have forgotten.  Finding that language again will bring us back in touch with those spirits of place we need to remember again.

Part of the mystic experience is to be able to change your vibration and your sensitivity so that you resonate with things that normally would be outside of your daily experience.  You begin to resonate with the energy of boulders, or resonate with a river, or resonate with a valley, with a sky.  And as you open yourself to these possibilities you are opening yourself to another world of connection which people have known of for ages.  It is us now who have forgotten.  We are the ones who need to come back and remember.

The doors of consciousness open as one door, and another and another.  And each of them presents as a question and not as an answer.  It is the question that drives us forward. We are headed toward a wonderful revelation of who we are, how did we get here, and what happens next.

All mystery systems have a kernel of truth within them, that is why they survive for thousands of years in our cultural paradigm.  They are helpful in opening us to insights about who we are and the work we have come to do.  I have one hundred and fifty files of different aspects of pursuing the question of who I am, why I am, why I am here, why I do this work.  I also have a journal each year that is inches thick of the daily events of my life and the coincidences and convergences, synchronicity and the thread of wonder and awe that connects all of my days.

Part of what I am describing to you is a prophecy from the Hopi, The Blue Star Kachina Prophecy.  It states that some of the messages and the memories of the wisdom keepers are in the stones around us. This includes crystals and gems and semi-precious stones.  Stones have a very long memory like a living library of information, and there are people who access that.  It is possible to have a conversation with a stone, I have seen it done on many occasions.  When a stone is in its natural environment and in touch with everything around it there is a different experience than when you take that stone and stand it on its end.  Then it is in contact with the earth and it is also symbolically in contact with the sky, at the edge between worlds, pointing, connecting to eternity. These stones tell a different story.

There is a very large story happening. My name is Aleskkya and I am coming to understand that I am a messenger, part of a larger unfolding of this old way and the new way.  We live in this culture that embraces technology and science and this is a new way of living in the world today.  Within this context my story is one of the old ways that people will remember as part of healing not only ourselves but healing the planet for the next phase that comes.  And we are now beginning the long ascension into knowledge again, the kind of knowledge that brought us some of the mysteries that still live with us in the world today.  This is one of the old ways that brings us into touch with this legacy again, with this entire conscious environment that we can interact with which we have somehow turned ourselves away from.  Knowledge brings wisdom, and with our heart wisdom comes love.

But if we really want to have the experience we can change our consciousness, open ourselves to that, it is available to everyone.  And I assure you that there is no way at this point that you will anticipate all of the wonders that await on the other side of these open doors.

Prayerful intention has been a part of our interaction and relationship with the environment for ages.  Even though you and I might live as though that mystic realm doesn’t exist this lack of acknowledging it is an aberration.  It is the aberration of this time that we share, the thing we can, and I think we will remember as the work of our age.

I think that our ability to change the reality of our world through intentional prayer is real.  Science today has demonstrated that the world is a reflection of consciousness.  And to be able to acknowledge that there are entities who assist in that is a very powerful and timely message.

 III

I had the unusually good fortune to have been embraced by a Legend of Bluegrass in Tennessee who is Cherokee. The Trail of Tears passed through his family’s historic homestead and in his later years he also served as President of the Blythe Ferry Cherokee Removal Memorial. As a gift he gave my family a Cherokee metáte, a stone mortar and pestle from his home. A thousand miles away, and seven generations after the event I created an offering in a sacred doorway for the Trail of Tears with his gift. I carried the metáte up a mountain and placed it with other offerings of flowers and fruits and seeds on the Summer Solstice sunrise with the intention of transforming the cultural history of the Trail of Tears.  Once a sad and tragic event, may my prayer transform this legacy into one of joyful remembrance of the beautiful gift that this culture still represents today.

An outgrowth of this loving work are the photographs.  Normally in the history of this kind of interaction with sacred sites photography was not allowed.  There are some very good reasons for that.  I was not thinking of any of this at the time I embarked on this body of work while carrying a camera.  I only sought to create beauty on my path.

Because I come to this work as one who is remembering, I am not beholden to a single teacher, tradition, or mystery school.  I believe that this is the work that I have come to do and to share with you now.

The camera has shown that when you take a three dimensional space and you flatten it into the plane of a photograph different aspects in the environment can become expressed. Stones that appeared static before are now a recognizable part of a fluid image, part of a face, or part of an entity we experienced subconsciously before. It is not the photographs themselves that are the work. The photographs are an artifact of the real work and only a messenger. The real work is about a relationship capable of manifesting a new reality, a door to a world we already have the key to.  The work of a true heart.  A realization of beauty.

When we come into these spaces we are praying, affecting change in the world.

Everywhere can be considered sacred in this living earth. Throughout history and across the globe there are spaces that we identify as sacred because they are also a point of contact between our lives and the lives of the spirits of place. These spaces represent relationship, they represent a true heart, intention and manifestation.

They are places where we can remember the Garden. Where we enact our own destiny, healing ourselves and our planet.  Where we dare to dream our most beautiful dream, and reclaim our birthright holiness.