Drawing Lines

I’ve been thinking about how our sense of property is so clearly a reflection of our collective identification with the ego. Land ownership is rather novel in what it does to our relationship to the world. The surveyor verifies certain measurements that define the limits of what one can call “mine.” And with that ownership, a sense of privacy, protection, exclusion and security emerges. In these hills yellow “no trespassing” signs are quite in vogue.

Let’s contrast that with the act of drawing a sacred circle for a dramatic ritual, whereby the stage becomes not the place of ego defenses, but a landing pad for the gods and goddesses that are invited to manifest themselves. This boundary is a cosmic inversion of the petty kingdom the ego has devised for itself through property ownership. The sacred circle is an open invitation to those powers both other than and beyond the ego.

It then becomes a matter of how. We are willing to work for decades to own a plot of land. For a sacred circle, a few pieces of wood will be all it takes. Campfires, with their glow against the darkness and the almost hypnotic reverie they create, are a simple way to participate and enter into the sacred circle’s potential.

Two distinct ways of being in the world. One shouts “me,” the other whispers “thou.” Two distinct ways of blogging too…