An experience of moving between two understandings of sacred text and their keys to unlock the mystical, shared by Viv Hawkins.

The reason I’ve written nothing yet for Mystical Friend is I’m mid-air above and between two cliffs that hold meaning for me about mysticism.

On the one side, the one which once spoke instructionally to me, is what the conventional scriptures offer. The stories from the Bible and the Mahabharata, the teachings of the Koran, Tao te Ching, Buddhist sutras, the poets who interpret those texts as do Rumi, Gibran, Blake…

On the other side of what feels like a canyon, the place which I have not yet fully come to acknowledge as mysticism, has been speaking to me through Leaves of Grass, Sand County Almanac, Silent Spring, Braiding Sweetgrass, Orbital… over decades of my life. It sings on vacation at Girl Scouts National Center West in Ten Sleep, Wyoming; on the wildlife drive at Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge along the New Jersey shore; underwater along the John Pennicamp State Park reef; along the New Jersey Delaware Bayshore among horseshoe crabs at the June full moon; standing tear-struck in awe as masses of snow geese pass noisily overhead…

And yet, I’ve since watched the tide come in and go out at the Bay of Fundy, heard bull elk bugling in the U.S. Rockies, watched the sun rise behind saguaro cacti, felt awed by the Milky Way streaming over the canyons at Bryce, shivered at the sheer expanse of snow and bare tundra on the Icefield Parkway, washed away all care walking river beds in Denali and Olympic National Parks, reverenced bison herds moving on range and in valley, stood transfixed beneath redwoods and sequoias, rejoiced at the greenest grass growing up through Jasper’s blackest black charcoal, tasted the sweetly-sharp burst of wild ginger medicine on Chippewas of Nawash unceded land, glimpsed roseate spoonbills gliding graciously over Everglades, luxuriated in the vanilla scent of summer Ponderosa pines, kayaked among gators and cypress tree knees, walked among the gift of fireweed in flower and in seed…

Viv’s Reflection:
Throughout my lifetime, the natural world has spoken to me in ALL CAPS. As I immerse myself in some of the most beautiful natural sites in the U.S. and Canada, the sanctity of what they have to say is undeniably becoming another form of scripture to me.

And yet naming as “mystical” those experiences – those discrete ones that touch me to tears and even the entire symphony of the spheres that they play together – feels new and awkward to me.

Yet, what wonders! Written on the Earth so much more powerfully than characters on paper or on a screen can ever be.

How do I fail to see these as mystical experiences when they sang to my soul in a way my heart remembers which my head has not yet learned? How do I miss the golden thread which ties all these to a sense of Transcendence, At-one-ment with no need to atone, simply communion in a universal sense? How is this not, as Lola Georg defines it, “evidence of the intangible aspects of life” even as rooted in life’s tangible aspects?

Curiously, before embarking on our vanlife journey/ pilgrimage, I had a feeling I was about to go and “Look for America,” as the words to the song go. And, while I’ve found some of it, I’ve discovered for myself something far more profound: a union which transcends space and time that is embedded in and connects every part to every other part and to itself. Something ineffable lives here. So I remember Denise Levertov’s The Avowal and step out shyly onto air.