The Importance Of Having A ‘Magic Place’
The fall colors have been particularly dazzling this year in Illinois where I live. It is as if the season intuits that we’ve endured many difficult months and need as much beauty as possible to lift our spirits.
I recently read a reflection on autumn in which the writer described fall as the season that teaches us to let go. I like to think of autumn as a season for savoring, for holding onto to as many precious moments as possible of the vibrant colors, the decreasing daylight and waning warmth of our days.
Because of the pandemic, I don’t have as hectic a travel schedule as usual. I’ve been able to watch the daily transformation of each tree in my neighborhood bursting into color. There is a backyard maple whose leaves blend orange and gold with red tips. I don’t ever remember the colors on that tree being quite so stunning.
Watching the leaves turn has become my new contemplative practice. It reminds me that there is value of sometimes staying in place.
In her wonderful book, “Gold in Your Memories,” Benedictine Sister Macrina Wiederkehr urges us to find a “magic spot.” That is, a place of silence and solitude where we can listen to the stirrings of the heart and simply be.
Sister Macrina tells of growing up in a farmhouse with few opportunities for privacy. Her “private room” was a cornfield.
“I made a little broom with tall grasses and swept an area clean,” she writes. “An old shirt served as a rug. There in that magic spot, I would sit for hours and dream.”
As an opening meditation when I lead retreats, I often show a series of images accompanied by music, usually scenes in nature or photographs taken by my friend Brother Paul Quenon on the grounds of his monastery in Kentucky, the Abbey of Gethsemani.
Whenever people offer their feedback on the retreats, they usually mention those photographs as one of their favorite parts. It is as if I have given them, if only virtually, a few magic places to make their own.
Because of the current health crisis, many of us have lost our usual indoor and outdoor magic spots, or “happy places,” as a friend of mine calls them. Our screened-in front porch — a place I rarely used before the pandemic — has become one of my new magic spots.
It offers a fine perch in which to sit undetected and listen for the staccato whistle of a dickcissel, the cheer, cheer, cheer of a cardinal, and the distinctive caws of our ever-present crows.
Sometimes the birdsong combines with the castanet-like snapping of crickets and cicadas, the barking of a neighborhood dog, the moan of a distant train, or snippets of conversation.
Our neighborhood is blessed with a variety of trees, from Chinese elms to black locusts to redbuds, white oaks and maples. My favorite is a tall evergreen on the lawn of the house across the street. It rises about 100 feet, casting a soaring figure against a cloudless blue sky.
What’s fascinating is that about half of the tree trunk is branchless. Every year it seems to lose more branches, like the hairs of a man going bald.
It’s obvious the tree is slowly dying, yet it refuses to die. Perhaps that is why I admire it so much. If that tree can persevere, then so can I.
Brother Paul, my friend from the Abbey of Gethsemani with whom I co-wrote The Art of Pausing and an upcoming book called How To Be, reminds me that even monks need a magic place apart from the quiet monastery where they live and work.
Brother Paul told me about finding two such places recently amid the wooded knobs and rolling hills surrounding his abbey. One is a field of wild cilantro where he likes to sit alone on the ground on a rubber mat. The other is a grassy patch that he shares with some rabbit companions.
“Alone here a while, I silently learn that no one and nothing is alone. Here is a teeming courtyard of beings,” Brother Paul wrote me.
“Here I can only briefly stay, can only wait until sunlight streaks the ground and grows from gold to white. I do not know the language here; my ears are too dense to hear. It is only courtesy for me to leave at some point. And the day presses me on to return in time for our community prayers and the work of the day.”
In his book, “Domestic Monastery,” Father Ronald Rolheiser asks, “What is a monastery? A monastery is not so much a place set apart for monks and nuns as it is a place set apart, period. It is also a place to learn the value of powerlessness and a place to learn that time is not ours.”
What is your magic place, where you leave distractions behind and can rest in silence? If you don’t have one, can you create one this autumn, as Sister Macrina suggests, by “sweeping an area clean?”
