Archive for February 2014
Shasta Discovery
“When I first caught sight of it over the braided folds of the Sacramento Valley, I was fifty miles away and afoot, alone and weary. Yet all my blood turned to wine, and I have not been weary since.”
— John Muir
When I first heard of Mt. Shasta I had never actually heard of it before. Of course, I had drank Shasta Cola a few times as a kid, but I never really knew there was a real mountain called Shasta. Until that spring of ’72.
As I previously stated in part 2 of my 3-part blog entry ‘Mt Spiritual Adventure,’ my meditation teacher told me in spring about a retreat that was to take place up there in mid-summer. By early summer there was a lot of talk among some of my new-found meditation friends about who was going to make this spiritual trek to northern California … to that mountain called Shasta. A mountain that had a reputation as a sacred, mystical mountain drawing people from all over the world, as if a spiritual mecca of the west.
At that time I didn’t count myself on that list. I wasn’t sure I could get the money together, get time off work, or had a decent enough car to make such a long journey from Texas to a place I knew very little about. At least I wasn’t in summer school (I was 20 and in college at UT Austin) that year, so that wasn’t a problem. But the obstacles were there, and so I wrote it all off.