Chapter two - Rocks

The sign is chocolate brown with the image of a circle of standing stones in white. Relieved to find a sign I can read, and one that directs us to something I'm interested in, I pull off the exit and continue in the direction indicated. Soli is in the passenger seat now, pouring over notes on her laptop computer. I’m not sure what it is that a television producer actually does, but it obviously takes up a lot of her time and energy.

It is midday and the sun is bright and warm overhead in a postcard blue sky. A perfect day for riding in a convertible - but in our case, the red Mercedes station wagon will have to make do. "So - do you know where you’re going?" Soli asks, looking up from her computer.

"There was a sign for a stone circle. I thought it might be a good place for us to get a feel for sacred space." Soli shrugs and drops her gaze back to the screen. The chattering of her keyboard joins the voice of the wheels on the road. It’s a strange sort of music.

A few kilometers down the rolling country road, I spot a large piece of blue slate propped against a tree beside the road, with a single word scrawled in white paint - "rocks." I park the car on the muddy verge of the road and we climb out. Soli stows her computer away in the back and we follow the arrow on the "sign".

I wait for Soli to break out of her thoughts during our walk, but she is still silent when we arrive - not at a stone circle, but at a natural outcropping of stone, veiled in brilliant green moss. As Soli leans back against the stone in her red woolen wrap, with the moss running down the stone like rivulets of green water, I think that this was not a mistake. It’s not a stone circle, but it is definitely sacred space. I can feel the spirit of the place soothing us, and even Soli smiles now, though she’s not ready to talk yet.

Back in the car, we decide to try a little further along the road and after a couple more kilometers we come to another brown and white sign, courtesy of the ministry of tourism. The same ministry has obviously provided a small parking lot off to the right side of the road, where we leave the car and then walk back across the road to the site itself. There is an information booth that looks like it has not been open for several seasons at least, and off to one side of the stones themselves, there is a recreation of a megalithic settlement, along with a model which illustrates just how the ancients may have gone about raising the stones. It seems that both the booth and the accompanying exhibits have been abandoned. We have the place entirely to ourselves.

The stones have been only partially excavated, and there is still yellow plastic caution tape up around one section, but the main area is accessible. While Soli stands at the edge of the excavation, I approach slowly, even cautiously, listening on more than one level for any clues, cues or signs of how to proceed. Soli begins to look around as if she expects a gendarme to show up and cart us away for trespassing on a site of ancient relics.

There seems to me to be a faint boundary of sacred space still in place here. According to the artist’s sketch at the information booth, a double ring of stones once stood here. Now only a scattering of them remain, some fallen and others seeming to sink straight down into the earth. I stop at the outer circle of stones, beside one slender standing stone with both a light face and a dark one. I empty my pockets and remove my wristwatch, leaving anything overtly modern on the ground. Then I place my forehead and the palms of my hands against the outer face of the stone and ask silently for permission to enter. After a time, I feel a sliding sensation under my hands and, in my shamanic body, the stone moves open like a sliding double door and I step through.

Sometime later, as I slip back into my physical body and stoop to pick up my wristwatch and other technological cargo, I notice that Soli is sitting on a rock nearby and almost glaring at me. "What is it?", I ask.

"What on earth were you doing?" She frowns at me as if checking for signs of dementia. "You looked as if you were wandering off into another world."

"I guess I was", I laugh. "Or at the very least another time." I go on to tell her what I have just experienced.

As I crossed the threshold, I went from day into night, and the night was filled with the flickering light of many torches and the silence of many people watching me. A short stocky fellow with grizzled hair and beard stepped forward. He wore a long tunic of some rough material that might have been linen or wool. He stood directly in front of me looking slightly upward into my eyes and spoke.

It was as if I were in someone else’s body, but only present as an observer. This other someone knew what to say and do, and I also had a sense that he was aware of me as well. Through this other part of me, I understood that the priest standing in front of me had asked me my purpose for coming here, and that I had replied that I was here to make a bond between our people’s. He motioned for me to follow and led me a short distance through the stones to where a bonfire blazed at the center. I could make out huge pine or fir trees surrounding the outer boundaries of the stones, reflecting the light of the flames, and surrounding the fire were several circular rows of people standing and watching intently. Here at the fire he asked me to state my intentions again, and handed me a huge oxen horn, filled with honeyed beer. I raised the horn high and proclaimed in a loud voice, "let our people be as one people!" Then I spilled a bit of the beer into the flames and drank the rest as the voices around me chanted "halldess, halldess, halldess..."

I had followed the path of my shamanic body in my physical form as well, and suddenly I found myself back in the light of day, feeling like I had done what I had come here to do - fulfilling a task that was left undone a long time ago.

"How nice for you!" Soli replies in a tone that lets me know she is just short of stamping her feet and throwing things.

At a loss for anything else to say, I ask "what are you feeling right now?"

She glares at me. "Nothing!" She practically shouts. "Not a damn thing!" Her denial is so intense that we both know it couldn’t be further from the truth. I walk over to her and kneel beside the stone. She turns away from me and looks into the grass at the base of the lichen covered rock.

"Why don’t you tell me about it?" I coax, keeping my voice pitched low and soft, gentle and calm. I think she might be about to start sobbing, or ready to explode. It is hard to tell which might happen first.

Sidebar -

Imagine you’re standing outside of a large building. Take a look at it. Imagine the size, color, the texture of it. How many windows does it have? How many doors? How close is it stand to the street? Is it surrounded by grass, by trees?

Now go to the door of this building. Reach out and touch it. Open the door and walk through. You are inside this building now. Feel what it is like to be contained, embraced by this building. Begin to explore. Take your time, discovering each room, one after another, until you arrive at the center. Here, in an open space, there is a single door. It seems to be placed into a wall, but the wall itself is invisible. As you try to walk around the door to see the other side, the door turns with you, always facing you.

Since you cannot move around the door, you go to it. Reached out and open the door, and step through. Coming out the other side of the door, it seems as if you have simply turned around and come back out the way you went in. The room around you looks pretty much like the room you just left. And yet you realize that it is a different room. Moving away from the door, you begin to explore this building as well. You find that, while it is similar to the building you just left, it is also subtly different.

Find you way back to the center again. Go to the door, and move through it, returning to that first building. You may leave the door open, or close it, as you will. Move on out of the building, turn around and look back at it.

This building is your physical body. The doorway at of the center of the building leads to your inner body. This introduces a dimension that we don’t usually deal with in our everyday lives. This is the dimension of inwardness.

This dimension is as important to the practicing shaman as the dimensions of width and height are to a carpenter. It allows us access to a whole spectrum of bodies beyond the physical.

Go ahead and try the simple exercise described above, realizing that the building you are entering is your physical body, and that you are moving through that door way at your center into a different body. Pay particular attention to any sensation you may experience while passing through that doorway.

© Kenneth Day