Luminous-ground

A Soul Place

What’s a soul place?

Larry Richardson, a wonderful Vermont photographer graciously gave Our Luminous Ground permission to publish this photo called “A Soul Place.”  He and the poet Charles Butterfield recently published a new book called  Another Light.

“Light is the theme of this collection. The photographs are products of light, many of the poems employ images of light, and we are reaching you through the miracle of the eye. But it is another light we celebrate here, that light by which we all can imagine the world.”
(from their website)

Soul places, then, according to these artists, are places where the miracle of our eyes and the wonder of light enable us to imagine the world.

High Places

Living in a state defined by its Green Mountains--Ver  Mont--we Vermonters rub shoulders with the rounded Adirondacks to the west and the jagged White Mountains on the east.

If you travel farther north and east you come upon Maine’s massive granite Mt. Katahdin guarded by what the Penobscots call Pomola, a weather spirit, a creature with the body of a man, the wings of an eagle and the head of a bull moose.

The Shimmering Peace of a Place

This morning the overlapping rows of our low Vermont mountains to the south of us, are covered with layers and overlayers of mist. It’s a Chinese painting.

Mist is a beautiful natural power, according to the ecopsychologist and expert in all things Celtic, Frank MacEowen. Not water, and not air, mist dances between the two elements and calls us to cross over a magical threshold. MacEown claims that over time “we can become so profoundly merged with a place and identified with its energy that we become part of its spirit, its voice.”

In The Mist-Filled Path, MacEowen calls places where we merge with the "otherworld," spiritscapes.

Using “mist” as a guiding metaphor for understanding a place, remember misty places you’ve quietly observed. Thin places. Threshold places. Potential doorways to a sacred world.  Places where, as this Celtic writer claims, you can rediscover the shape of your soul. Places where you enter your spiritscape. Did you sense a shimmering peace?

Sentient Architecture

“Sentient” obviously refers to our senses. But it’s a word with deeper meaning.  It also means being consciously aware of how we feel.

How do you design a home with feeling? With emotion? Christopher Travis, an architect from Texas who also has a philosophy degree, has crafted a psychological and aesthetic compatibility tool for his clients who believe, as he does, that a home does not have to be just a building. It can be an emotional experience.

Travis calls his trademarked process, “TrueHome.” At least 70 happy customers are living in homes that truly belong to them. They are “suites of emotional responses” emerging from the brains of the folks who live there. It’s why the New York Times called an article about  Travis’s work, “Home is Where the Head Is” (July 17, 2008)

By referring to clients’ carefully answered questionnaires, Travis designs a home reminiscent of their happy childhood memories and avoids design elements that brought stress. By learning about the home-owner’s parents, siblings, relationships, childhood issues, life experiences, he tries to avoid what he calls “design dysfunction.” Travis doesn’t do these emotional profiles alone—a clinical and neuro psychologist help him. His 100 page client questionnaire has questions such as “if your partner’s messiness was behind closed doors, would you be willing to accept it?”

A Chartres Experience

I’ve only been to Chartres cathedral once, but when I walked through that big solid west door under the famous rose window, I knew I was feeling something different than I ever felt in a large church before—something at a deep soul level.  My heart seemed to calm and race at the same time.

I was “lapis lazulied” by the blues. I was “rubied” by the reds. I hadn’t read much about Chartres, so I wasn’t pre-programmed to expect anything unusual; but it just overwhelmed me. I stood there gazing up at the color of the windows, at the myriad of shapes, their stories and symbols, at the arching space itself that pulled me past the labyrinth to the altar and I knew I HAD, simply HAD to go back to Boston and read everything possible about this place. I felt as people must feel when they can’t make out the letters in a book, that I had to teach  myself to read this stone book.  For some reason I could not explain, I felt I had to know—from a head perspective, how to interpret what my heart was feeling. This forest of columns was calling me (back?) to something I had no conscious words for.