Saturday was Pagan pride Day in Berkeley.  Many dear friends of mine participated, and if someone sends me an account, I’ll pass it along.  But after much dithering one way and the other, I did not go.

Part of the reason is that my spirituality is very private and  a parade simply didn’t appeal to me.   Perhaps this seems odd given that I have this blog.  But I find it difficult and even a little off-putting to write about the more intensely personal experiences I have and continue to have, in other words the actual reasons I am a Pagan. 

I know it is not necessarily inappropriate to do so, at least for many such experiences.  I just have difficulty doing it.  Intellectual argument is my strong suit.  But today’s blog is a another attempt to touch on this personal dimension.

I decided to hike up Mt. Tamalpais instead of going to PPD, or the competing alternative of a road trip up to Mendocino and back. Mt Tam is the prominent mountain rising to the right of the Golden Gate Bridge, just north of San Francisco.  Not a huge mountain by any standards, but it’s the only one we have adjacent to the Bay.  And she is extraordinarily beautiful. I’d hike not all the way, but much of it.

Tamalpais is feminine, yin, a flowing, embracing energy, especially on her western slope.  Gentle and strong, embracing but demanding, beautiful, but in her depths a bit aloof – you have to work to gain better access. At least I do.

But I wanted to immerse myself in the energy of the earth and sky and sea rather than Berkeley’s often frenetic crowds, get some distance from all the intellectual head tripping I have been up to of late, even on this blog.  (And I have more planned. . .)  

I wanted to get things in perspective, remind myself what I do all this heady stuff in defense of, and again be where I could access the real value and beauty of the earth and its aliveness. (She is everywhere, but for me She is not always equally accessible.)  I wanted to immerse myself in nature’s energies, undistracted by people or politics or the daily tasks of life.  I needed this connection with the unutterable Sacredness of our world far more than to be with my Pagan sisters and brothers, however beloved.  Mt. Tam was the medicine.

I started in Stinson Beach, a small coastal community nestled between wide Pacific beaches and the base of Mt. Tam, rising very steeply a few blocks from the shore. I spent the day hiking from Pacific beaches through meadows and coyote brush, up into cool narrow canyons filled with rushing falling water , bay trees and redwoods, and up still higher to rippling rolling grasslands and oak studded knolls carpeted with flowers: poppies, lupines (it’s a good year for lupines), blue eyed grass, buttercups, blue dicks, and so many more. As I approached my highest point, views opened up everywhere the two domed and final peaked summit did not block.

At the apex of my hike, at the Mountain Theater 2000 feet above the Pacific, I happened upon an advanced rehearsal of a forth-coming musical performance of the Man from la Mancha. Fine acting and singing, with everyone still in their ‘civvies.’  I watched quietly for a while before realizing I’d best be headed back.

Then down again, by a different route, through a drier forest with wildly shaped firs, California bay laurel, and coastal oaks not (yet?) done in by Sudden Oak Death,  the nursery industry’s latest gift to our flora.  I had the opportunity to meditate on loss and death, and how it fit into the larger patterns of our world which remains beautiful and perfect beyond words.  Finally very steep descents, and foot sore to my car, the drive up the coast and inland, to home.

The day had provided just the right mix of the art of nature and nestled within Her embrace, human art, of life and death, of ease and struggle, an opening of the heart and quieting of the mind.