Yellowstone Earthquakes Shake Free Memories

Since that project in the fifth grade when I created a clay three-dimensional map of Yellowstone National Park, the thermal wonderland has figured prominently in my imagination.  What’s sort of interesting: I’ve never had any direct encounter with that place.

In fact, the closest I got was ten miles from the North Gate.  I spent one night in a tent along the Yellowstone River.  Wolves howled that night after all the other campers had turned in.  My meditation focused on straddling the Continental Divide and how the next day, for the first time, I’d be turning my back on the Atlantic and entering for the first time a place where the waters flowed to the Pacific.   Then a cold front rushed down the valley from the North as if sent by the Atlantic herself.  The wind blew out my candle and the sudden drop in temperature sent me scrambling for my sleeping bag.  I have not scorned an ocean since.

Our original plan was to see a few sites at the northern end of the park before continuing our journey westward, but the traffic heading into Yellowstone the next morning dampened our enthusiasm.   Instead we pushed off for Idaho and a fantastic ride through the Lo Lo Pass, where Lewis and Clark finally broke through on their journey to the Pacific.  But I digress…

A Yellowstone of the Imagination: a wonderland with the largest beasts and geysers, hot springs and mud pots, and bears with sensitive noses for a-picnic-a-baskets. There’s a great loop road that rings the park, and it is that Mandala of a path through all those wonders that figures prominently in my dreamscape.  Often in my dreams, like that night perched on the northern rim, I enter the park from the North and a journey of the soul as represented by that place begins.  All seemingly possible because Yellowstone is the “caldara of a volcano that erupted 70,000 years ago.”

I recall like it was yesterday how the dramatic fires of 1988 marked not only the landscape, but my encounters within the imaginal.   Now, over the last two weeks the ground has been rumbling.  There have been hundreds of earthquakes centered at the north end of Yellowstone Lake.  What does Psyche have to say about that?