Days 1-3: The Initiation
My first impression of Castlewood was one of division. Alongside the road, the Lone Wolf Trail climbs diagonally up and across the side of a mountain. This mountain stretches in length and forms Castlewood's great ridgeline which has no name (...yet). Today, voices came up from below while slanted corridors of trees carried their sound upwards. Golden hour colored the forest but not the trail's dirt path, not the road below, and not the men on its gravel with their far-reaching voices. Golden hour's line of shadow was a barrier; the trees all together implying a long, towering wall. The Wood made it very clear that something of myself was required to enter, but the minds of people, externalized in their pleasant chatting, reminded me in their contrast with the full force of The Wood, that two worlds exist within one. In order to enter the world of The Wood, the human mind must allow the complete autonomy and full voice of nature to either ease it's way in or break its way through (generally by means of beauty). So with a freshly remembered reverence, one I've been homesick for these past many months, I turned away from the stranger's and I's shared mind-world that permeates so much, and I faced the mountain directly. And as I crested its ridgeline, I was nothing more or less than a lost ghost assuming a new form; a pilgrim gaining on unknown but long-awaited holy land.
Today, I've realized that reverence in silence isn't enough to complete the expression of worship, at least it isn't for me. And since I have always worshiped nature in one way or another while pretending to be doing something else, I figured it was time to do the thing properly.
So, welcome to church and to CastleWood-- oh cathedral at the heart of my suburban midwestern island in the great expanse of middle-of-nowhere-america-land.
