from Angela:

Just in case any of you are still reading this blog, I asked Dr Smith to post this for me. It is from a book called Pilgrimage: Adventures of the Spirit, which I highly recommend. The author of this particular essay, James Houston, is talking about a place called Mo’okini on the northern tip of the island of Hawai’i, but I think it’s safe to say that the passage will remind many of us of Dun Aengus. I certainly could have replaced the word Mo’okini with Dun Aengus (or several other places we visited in Ireland), and it would have worked for me. Here’s the passage:

“It is the kind of place you have to react to. You have to mark the spot, or write about it in your journal. Standing there, it isn’t hard to imagine the first human who stopped and gazed toward the next island in the constant wind and felt the urge to consecrate the moment, to send a voice across the water, make a song or make a chant or gather a few stones in a heap, as a way of saying ‘I touched this place, and this place touched me.’

“Perhaps that first visitor tells others a story that includes something about the look and feel of the barren point, and this story conveys whatever it called out of him. Eventually someone else wants to see what he is talking about and comes and adds a stone to the pile of stones or sends another call across the channel. And there is an agreement that, yes, the place has a kind of power, which is to say, it releases something in those who experience it. Nowadays we might name this reverence, or wonder, or awe.

“I believe that such feelings can linger in the air and in the land, gathering, over time, in invisible layers. And after enough people have visited a spot, to stand, to pray, to sing, to fast, to chant, century upon century, its original impact has been layered and amplified until the ancestral atmosphere around a site like Mo’okini he’iau [shrine] is so rich with what Hawai’ian’s call mana, you can feel it like a coating on your skin.

“The atmosphere seemed denser there, thick with its own history of reaching toward the higher power. Though I am not Hawai’ian and can claim no authentic ties to the long tradition of the he’iau, I felt profoundly connected to the place. During the couple of hours I wandered inside and outside the rocky walls, I felt I was in a state of grace. Later, trying to explain this to myself, I began to think of sacredness as a kind of dialogue between the human spirit and certain designated places. These sites that call forth reverence and awe and humility and wonder, we make them sacred. It is a way of honoring those feelings in ourselves. And when we hear the songs the places sing, we are hearing our own most ancient voices.”

[James Houston, from the essay “Black Stones, Ancient Voices,” in a book called Pilgrimage: Adventures of the Spirit, a book edited by Sean O’Reilly and James O’Reilly, and published in San Francisco by a company called Travelers’ Tales, Inc.]