Drumming the Chapel to Life

Did I ever tell you about the time we consecrated the chapel? It's one of my earliest postings, linked here. I've lost most of these photos due to a hard disk crash, so these few motley ones are the only ones that survive. Here's the first post about that (which contains nothing, really).

This was, very literally, the absolute beginning of my present vibrant spiritual life as far as I can trace it. This happened during the same weekend as our basic shamanism workshop that my friend Joana Shinkara in which I'd had my immediate, strong experience of meeting my formidable power animal. We ended this amazing weekend by consecrating the chapel built at Twelve Stone Farms in Georgia.

It's a cobb structure and very modest, but quite lovely. There's a medicine wheel built into its floor, and the main windows face South. The night we dedicated it, it was lit entirely with candles. There was a full moon! We walked up the hill from the shed where we were staying, through a herd of horses, our feet wet from the dew that had fallen.

There were many of us, men, women, all ages. We said things, we sang, we drummed a little, and then at the end of the ceremony we were asked to each put a pubic hair into a special container that was to stay in the chapel, and then we drummed the chapel into working spiritual existence. We drummed outside, we drummed inside, we walked around the perimiters, we walked around the inside perimiters.

I walked on the medicine wheel. And stood in the center.

Standing on the center stone of a medicine wheel while in the full throes of a major drumming is, in a word, fucking amazing.

If you ever, ever get the chance, please do this for yourself. The energy swirls, envelops you, pierces you, suffuses you. Changes you, moves you.

I know that I was caught up in the moment. But, I also am convinced that magic happened that night in that place. We called and "activated" the Spirit of that place, I am certain.

Quite an amazing experience.


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