Remote Viewing as Spiritual Practice
There is no such thing as certainty
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Solitude in the Vedauwoos
All photography by Angela Atkinson
“The sacred attitude is one that does not recoil from our own inner emptiness but rather penetrates into it with awe and reverence, and the awareness of mystery. “
~ Thomas Merton
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about solitude. I’ll tell you, a great place to ponder this is . . . Wyoming.
Feeling drained by civilization (which seems to happen about once a month these days), I packed up the truck camper, asked my husband to tend the chickens and ripening tomatoes, and got the solo time that my soul has been craving.
I am camping among the sagebrush and incessant winds of the Vedauwoo Mountains in southern Wyoming. “Vedauwoo is Arapaho for “Land of the Earthborn Spirits.”
The Vedauwoo Mountains is a land of rocks, near constant wind, sagebrush, stunted aspens, and skies filled with roiling dark clouds. Ravens catch thermals, twirling and banking and careening in the wind gusts.
I am drawn to these wild, desolate places. It’s here in this empty, desolate place that I come to hear myself, for my mind to quiet down.
There’s a beauty here that requires commitment and effort to appreciate. It’s not the postcard beauty of lush fields of wildflowers and gushing waterfalls of the high mountains of Colorado.
Rather, it’s a beauty of geometric shapes, tall prairie grasses, and the soft palette of pale green and buff.
Here and there is a single yellow flower or a white mushroom or a rosehip, but these splashes of color are the exception.
This harsh monochromatic sparse landscape soothes me.
It is me.
The emptiness here not only reflects but echoes a growing sense of emptiness within. This hollowness . . . it’s not loneliness or like something is missing.
It’s more like an absence of internal boundaries that serve to delineate, demarcate, define. Freedom.
For example, I can’t read anymore. I’ve been a voracious reader my entire life. But now, I’m lucky if I complete two or three chapters before I put the book on the growing pile of half-finished books.
It’s like the words on the page just slide off my consciousness, like water on oil.
The best way I can describe it is words come into my brain and then slip away without leaving an impression. Poetry is the exception but only ones of few stanzas.
It seems as though I have no room for clutter in my interior life – the act of thinking, contemplating the future, analyzing the past, metrics on how I’m doing in this life – are all uninteresting and don’t belong in this remodeled interior home.
I’m left with the most pared down of observations – the wind feels warm on my face. There’s a cigarette butt on the ground. Shall I pick it up?
Look at that white mushroom on this barren plain – how crazy is that?!
The poet John Keats talks about “negative capability”: that intuitive mode of thought that allows us to reside in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reach after fact and reason.”
This is the best description I have found for the rewiring of my system that is informed by different forms of knowing – intuitive, somatic, emotive.
Is this a byproduct of the pandemic, when society as a whole seemed to reorient to different compass bearings? While uncomfortable and unsettling, it feels inevitable and – well – right.
It’s as though this emptying opens up to a threshold to a different way of living . . .
life as a dance of prayer and contemplation of all that is sacred.
I wonder . . . are you too feeling this shift in your own life?
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