Globetrotters December Travel Writing Prompt

A Spiritual Place, a Place of the Spirits

Different people are looking for different things

(This article is based on a writing prompt in Globetrotters)

It could have gone in a few different directions, and maybe that’s all you want in a good writing prompt. A grain, a kernel, an idea and then the rest is left up to you to decide where it ends up.

Spiritual sites are this month’s topic. Cathedrals, temples, museums, galleries, cemeteries, pilgrimages, places where something big happened in history, that sort of thing.

They’ve all been a part of my travels in one way or the other from the most grandiose to the smallest and most insignificant.

But what does it actually mean, to be in a spiritual or sacred space? Different things to different people, would be my first answer. Is it a place that is so monumental that you have no choice but to share it with busloads of others while you are there, perhaps in some form of communion? It would be nice if it actually turned out that way. But everyone is there for their own reasons, so it rarely turns out that way.

Machu Picchu springs to mind and so does that one photo that everyone who has been there has. The thought of having to line up and navigate my way through the crowds to get my one moment has always put me off. Maybe that’s why I didn’t go there when I traveled in Peru.

But I’ve been to plenty of them and definitely shared space at them with my fair share of people: Teotihuacán in Mexico City, Cristo Redentor in Rio de Janeiro, Petra in Jordan, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Borobudur in Java.

Who was it that said, “hell is other people”? These places are crawling with them, but what are you going to do? How many times in life are you going to get to these must see places? You and thousands of other people are thinking at exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.

But we mustn’t be cynical. It gets us nowhere.

The places I mentioned above are important to experience at some point, sure. But they aren’t what I immediately thought of when I was prompted to think of spiritual places.

Maybe it’s somewhere that I am by myself or with one other important person, staring out into the vastness and tension of simplicity and overwhelming complexity that is laid out before you?

Or is it a moment, even a fleeting one? One that happens by accident on the way to the place that I’ve sought out and moved heaven and earth to get there, for the lifetime bucket list full of plans, calculations, bookings and logistics. John Lennon said that “life is what happens when we are busy making other plans.”

Or did I just stumble on it, by chance and was so captivated by it that I knew immediately it would move something in me. Or maybe I didn’t realize what it would mean to me until later. Maybe it wasn’t an accident.

Or maybe — and this is where I’m going with this — it was right under my nose all along and maybe it took going out in the world to find it, to realize that it was right here the whole time.

Like all of their great monthly prompts on Globetrotters, once I’d digested what they were looking for, my next move was to my camera roll to see if my memory could be jogged by an image of someplace I’d been in the last while that could represent, to me, a place or time of spiritual experience.

Somewhere, where it all came together and I just got it.

The image I used at the top of this article may have already given it away: the still pristine forests of the Coast Mountains north of Vancouver, BC. And perhaps a secret camping spot tucked in there that I really don’t want to tell you about yet.

The hikes and trails really aren’t that hard to get to from the city. Maybe that’s a good thing and maybe it’s not. But if I time it right I can hit it and have the trees and the air all to myself and one other person.

But am I ever really alone there? Or does placing yourself in an untouched wilderness put you quickly in mind of the fact that this was all here long before you and will be here long after as well? Or that people have been living here and passing through long before my kind ever arrived on the scene? Or that spirits most certainly dwell here?

The trees stretch skyward and cause a dim light to exist on the ground, that is cut through by shafts of sunlight here and there. The air is cold and bracing. The sound is of the wind in the trees and the water flowing nearby. There’s often a goal in mind — the completion of an out and back trail or a loop. But other times, the goal is just to be in it.

Spiritual and sacred means different things to different people, all are valid. We might travel far and wide to find it, we might dream of being in those places where god and ancient cultures exist, where illuminating texts were written, where the cradle of history took shape, where things are remembered while others are forgotten.

Or we might just find it right where we began in the first place.

If this subject is your bag, then there are a some other really great articles that you should read on the subject:

Mario López-Goicoechea finds what he needs in a city, THE city:

Oksana Kukurudza's Sunflowers Rarely Break finds it outside in nature, around the world:

Serhii Onkov finds it in the area around a monastery: