A Private Nook

I have come to believe that most of us have experienced some lonely spot, some private nook, some glen or streamside-scene that impressed us so deeply that even today its memory recalls the mood of a lost enchantment. At the age of eighty, my grandmother used to recall with delight a lonely tract she called "Beautiful Big South Woods." There, as a girl one spring day, she had seen the whole floor of the woods, acre on acre, carpeted with the blooms of bloodroot and spring beauties and blue and pink hepaticas. She had seen the woods only once but she never forgot it.

     When Henry Thoreau was five, his parents, then living in the city of Boston, took him eighteen miles into the country to a woodland scene that he, too, never forgot. It was, he said, one of the earliest scenes stamped on the tablets of his memory. During succeeding years of childhood, that woodland formed the basis of his dreams. The spot to which he had been taken was Walden Pond, near Concord. Twenty-three years later, writing in his cabin on the shores of this same pond, Thoreau noted the unfading impression that "fabulous landscape" had made and how, even at that early age, he had given preference to this recess--"where almost sunshine and shadow were the only inhabitants that varied the scene"--over the tumultuous city in which he lived.

     John C. Merriam, at the time he was President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., wrote of the profound effect a woodland hilltop, rising beyond the pastures of a valley at his childhood home, had upon his early life. The margin of this forest seemed like an impenetrable wall beyond which lay a place of continuous night. Often at evening he could hear the howling of wolves among the trees. His imagination peopled the hilltop with strange creatures and, in his mind, the timbered track became symbolical of all that is mysterious and awaiting solution.  As the later years of his life passed, this eminent scientist wrote, the thing that led him on was the endless challenge of the unknown--a challenge that appeared to him first in the form of this dark and distant woods of his boyhood.
- Edwin Way Teale, The Lost Woods

Joseph Campbell called that place of spiritual rejuvenation the Grail Castle.

Your Sacred Place

Your sacred place is
where you can find yourself
again and again.

You don't really have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that's not a Waste Land; some field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia — a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you — a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there. The joy is there.

A sacred place is hermetically sealed off from the temporal world. When you're in such a space, there is no penetration through the enclosure. You are in an eternal zone that is protected from the impact of the stimuli of the day and the hour.

The Grail Castle — for that's what this sacred space is — is the place where your associations are not with the field of phenomenal experience, but with the field of your own inward life. To visit the Grail Castle is to have found your sacred space. Then, once you have found the connection in your sacred space, you can perhaps translate it into other parts of your life. But first you have to have a little oil well that goes down deep.
- Joseph Campbell as quoted in A Joseph Campbell Companion. Selected and Edited by Diane K. Osbon

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