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.
But as the retreat dates got closer, the talking heated up. And so did my enthusiasm. And before I knew it I was on the road with about thirty other people, all of us in a caravan of eight cars. Wow, how crazy were we? … traveling more than 2,000 miles to a destination none of us had even been to, or knew much about. Not only that, we were going to spend two weeks camping out at about 7,000 feet with other people we didn’t know at all who were coming from other parts of the country. Actually, the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. And before we ever even got there the trip itself turned out to be so very eventful all by itself, that it could probably be called a spiritual experience in and of itself.
I will attempt to run down all that happened, in as few words as possible; we had three flat tires, two engines blown up (one was mine), fenders got ripped off (one was mine) and brakes burned up while towing one of the disabled cars (one was mine – seems to be a theme here?), various other car repairs, stuck in a massive storm while going through a mountain pass, several times we got split up, at one point the caravan got split into 4 different pieces, we made two all night runs to catch up for lost time because of the car repairs, many of which we did ourselves in rest areas and camping areas, and we just happened to pick up one of my brothers hitchhiking along the way after we missed him at a rendezvous point the day before (very serendipitous). And on the day before we arrived at Mt. Shasta we got to another mountain 100 miles away and climbed a trail to the very top; Mt. Lassen. When we got to the summit after a fun hike, we could see Mt. Shasta in the distance. What a magnificent sight she truly was!
The very next day we finally arrived at this amazing, majestic mountain, a whole week after we had left. Seven days to drive 2000 miles across the country through all kinds of crazy events with a great group of people who kept it all together in the end. And once we drove up the mountain and arrived at our camping area, we felt relaxed. In fact, several remarked that it was like coming home. In a spiritual sense of the meaning, we began to learn what that meant those next two weeks of being ‘where heaven and earth meet’.
For the next two weeks it almost felt like we were in some version of heaven. We meditated, hiked, camped, listened to lectures, communed with nature, went swimming (yes some skinny dipping), had group potlucks, night campfires, made new friends and had lots of fun. But the most important thing seemed to be the spiritual lessons the mountain had for us, each of us individually. For even though we came together as a group, we each had own special lessons to unravel while being on the mountain. We had guides to help us along, but in the end it was up to each one of us to do our own lesson plan. That seemed to be a theme to what this was all about up on this special mountain. If you were open to ‘her’ lessons, she would be there to help guide you along, as long as you were willing to put the time in. Time meaning, your meditation time. And ‘her’, meaning the spiritual being who was in charge of the mountain … Duja.
Yes, Duja. That was her name, the being who held spiritual court over this mountain called Shasta. At first I was skeptical, until I ‘met’ her. There was a special place on the mountain we had to hike to where I was introduced to Duja. As were a number of us. This took several minutes (the introduction, not the hike) and for the most part I wasn’t aware of her, until at the very end. I could barely make her out with what little ‘spiritual vision’ I had running, as I was still learning what that was and how to use it. But one thing did stand out. The ringing sound in my head, the thing I was learning to meditate on, got much louder and higher when I saw her. At that time I wondered, ‘What did that mean?’
Over those two weeks I had a number of other experiences, and by the end of all of it, I was sure there was no way I was ever going to leave. I actually had begun to think of this mountain as home. And for the first time, I was starting to think that maybe there was something to all this meditation routine. I was still the healthy skeptic, but I also didn’t want my skepticism to blind me to another reality. So for a while I straddled the fence, but I also decided I would remove any blinders that hindered my forward progression into a newer, healthier future. A future I still had no inkling of … except I do know that this first wondrous trek towards the beginning of my discovery of Mt. Shasta, certainly changed me forever … in a way that is very difficult to put into words, as I feel I barely gave it justice here. But I tried, and will continue to do so … onward & upward!
TMC