Founder Letter: Walking to the Springs, Touching the Land

Dear Rosies,

When I walk to the springs on my home mountain, Mt. Tamalpais in Northern California. It's such a pleasure to feel the land, and a bit of a pilgrimage to get there.

It just so happens that around the world, people are returning to this kind pilgrimage, as well as longer arc treks like the Camino in Spain, and reclaiming the ancient understanding that body and earth are dancing partners in sacred choreography. How did we lose this in the first place, this sense of the land, that all indigenous people around the world remember? 

In the US, the wound has a history, which I will very very briefly share here. It starts in England, centuries ago. The land was full of sacred sites: people made pilgrimage to wells and springs, walked to shrines and groves. These journeys were acts of relationship, ways of bringing the body into contact with the currents of organic belonging. Then under King Henry VIII (in the break with Catholicism, a combination of political power and protestant zealotry) delivered a blow to this way of life: they seized all of Britain's 800 monasteries, the monks and nuns killed or sent away. The economy of hosting and gifting involved in pilgrimage was thus eliminated. Sacred springs were filled in, shrines dismantled and pilgrimage outlawed. The divine was removed from Earth and relocated to doctrine. Matter was stripped of revelation.

This worldview traveled with settlers and soldiers when they came to North America. The land here was already deeply known by Indigenous peoples who lived in relationship with rivers, mountains, and waters, but colonizers brought their own inherited patterns and repeated them here: groves cleared, shrines dismantled, wells redirected, forts built on sacred sites. The empire brought a broken cosmology that had already lost its own root. This is still playing out when native peoples argue for water rights, for keeping development off of holy mountains, for the sanctity of burial grounds - they still remember.

But now that it is visible, we can change the story. 

Many of us have been floating too long, suspended too often in digital atmospheres, but its an easy fix. In a world of virtual realities, we crave the irreducible reality of nature. The earth calls through the ache in our urban-cramped shoulders and through the yearning that rises when we glimpse wild beauty. Some part of us knows that body itself is a landscape to be inhabited. Walking, we learn to read not only the signs of nature but also the body's terrain: how morning stiffness speaks of yesterday's miles, how blisters become teachers of patience, how we synchronize our heartbeat with the pulse of earth beneath. This skin, these bones, this blood is the very vessel through which the infinite makes itself known. This is embodied spirituality.

The walking journey becomes a place of courtship between human and more-than-human worlds. 

Pilgrimage doesn't need to be distant or elaborate. Like me, you can walk to the spring or creek near your house, or sit on the hilltop, or listen to the wind. You can carry a question as you walk and let the land inform the answer.

Also, to resacralize the land includes the body! We are the earth, and our bodies are made of the same elements as the stones we walk on and the water we drink. 

Wishing all beings deep connection with nature in the beauty and the fierceness, reading the relationship to land and place, knowing what its telling us.

So here, the springs are singing. I'm headed over the mountain to fill my cup.

Christine Marie Mason

Founder, Rosebud Woman

Host, The Rose Woman Podcast

@rosebudwoman

@christinemariemason