A Sense Of Place
In the fall of 1986. I rented an old twelve room house in the hills of Sausalito, California. Its second-floor windows and balcony had lovely water views. Hundreds of monarch butterflies stopped at my front garden in springtime and the back garden was frequented by a bobcat. Its main room was large enough for Friday night group ceremonies. I took to walking the waterfront, late at night and again early in the mornings. Often, walking along the bay I would enter a mysteriously foggy realm accented by a mournful foghorn.
Europeans had arrived in Sausalito in the 1820s and soon began the displacement of local people and destruction of its shoreline. Indigenous burials at the edges of tidal areas and shell mounds above the tide line were understood as nothing more than obstructions to development. Vacant stretches of waterfront were drained and infilled; marsh became yacht basins.
Like many old port towns along San Francisco Bay, Sausalito once had a Barbary Coast. Its downtown restaurants and hotels hosted gambling, prostitution and drug sales. Beaches and marshes hid nighttime drug smuggling. Outlaws like ‘Buckskin’ Frank Leslie had a safe heaven. Artists, poets and musicians were also part of the mix as well as fisherman, merchants and railroad workers. During the Second World War, the waterfront was home to a thriving shipyard which employed 10,000 workers. Sausalito’s most notorious mayor, a retired underworld character, used her office to promote low budget tourism which offset the loss of revenue as the town slowly reformed itself.
Healing this waterfront of its negative synergy of disturbed native burials, violence, hatred, and assault was beyond my training and experience which had been limited to individuals in face-to-face encounters. I began by offering my usual healings only on a larger scale. Twice a day, I visited an area of the waterfront and offered it a healing. First, I would offer a vibration of love which I projected from my eyes or abdomen. Then I tried kindness. I had better success offering the color red. Finally, I settled on a purple-colored energy after I absorbed the negativity of an area into my lower abdomen. This was a slow process which continued for three or four years. I never did succeed in restoring the waterfront to what I imaged was its pre-contact vitality: it had been too damaged. I did remove its toxic energies so walking the waterfront now does not distress me. But the healthy and vibrant land and water described in the writing of Sausalito’s first European resident, Richardson, is lost to us.
Inside of my frustrated struggles with the toxicity of the waterfront was my disappointment with my limited skills. I needed a traditional teacher who would accept me as a student. So, I began to search remote rural areas of Mexico and Peru. Unexpectedly, when I was on the verge of giving up my search, I met Don Manuel Quispe who immediately took me as his student. Don Manuel taught me to evoke powerful spirits who lived in the high mountains of the Andes.
Back home in Sausalito, I focused on Mt. Tam., a rather diminutive mountain compared to the towering granite peaks of the Andes. My frustrations with Tam, and then my frustrations with Mt. Diablo and Mt. Vision were the beginning of my coming to terms with transplanting the Andean esoteric tradition of communing with mountain spirits. I discovered that each of these mountains near San Francisco were disturbed by large cell phone, microwave and radar towers, a disturbance unknown to Don Manuel. The resident mountain spirit hides from this electromagnetic pollution, so evoking it and its network of mountain spirits is arduous. Today, I live under Mt. Burdell which has a large communications tower at its peak. I can summon its spirit from hiding only for the duration of a ceremony of communion and gifting. Otherwise, its spirit is hidden.
I commune with the high mountain spirits of New Mexico and Texas which I began visiting about twenty-five years ago. These remote mountain peaks are free of electromagnetic pollution and readily welcomed me when I awoke them from their slumber and reestablished their mountain spirit networks. Today, I continue these mountain spirit relationships as well as with a mountain spirit in the Andes; physical proximity is not important.