Blog o’ Gnosis

Today I took a much-needed break after weeks of teaching, travelling, and working hard. I had been getting progressively more tired as the weeks went by, but I didn’t realize how bad off I was until I heard myself suggest to a friend that she take a day off to recharge. It was one of those moments when realization finally breaks through the fog: I am giving someone the exact advice I need to take.

So I freed up the day, tied up the dog, and headed for the one place I know can unravel all my layers of stress: a hot springs. It is the big reason I am grateful for living on the Pacific Ring of Fire. Sure, it gives us earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. But the distillation of all that dynamic moving and shaking, the watery jewels in the ring of fire, are the hot springs.

In my case it was Harbin Hot Springs, a perfectly lovely healing retreat space. There are a lot of things I don’t like about the Harbin scene, in fact that would be an amusing rant to get into someday, but the land itself and particularly the hot pool is a sacred site to me. It is the one place I know I can go and touch the heart of the mountain, let everything go, and come away renewed.

Harbin is situated on rugged, hilly terrain just east of Napa County’s Mt. St. Helena. The mineral baths of Calistoga, the Geysers, the hot springs, all tap deep into the roots of that old volcano. The hot water bubbles up from a narrow cleft in the hill, and it is piped into a deep pool where you can stand and be submerged up to your chin. The pool itself is housed in this funky old shack, open on two sides, with a faded fresco on one wall and opposite it a Demeter image with fresh flowers and lit candles sitting directly above the spout of flowing water.

The dim light, the silence except for the sound of water pouring into the pool, the intense, enveloping heat: you don’t have to squint very hard to feel like you are in some crumbling, forgotten temple, or at least have stepped into a Romantic era painting of one. After a series of hot and cold soaks, I like to lie on one of the cold, wet benches in that drafty room, with the rain dripping on me through cracks in the ceiling, and let my mind wander through the landscape.

As the tension sloughed off me like shale tumbling down a mountainside, I felt how if we are really lucky, the spot we choose as our own remakes us over time in its image. Standing strong and firmly rooted, riding with the changes, being fed by the fire at the center of the earth—I would be hard pressed to come up with a better spirit to aspire to. Today I felt that these times of extreme weariness serve one important function: they help grind away what no longer serves, and make it a necessity that we stay open to that constant flow of water from the heart of the mountain.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 10:43 pm and is filed under General, Spirit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.