Mount Shasta

Mount Shasta, California has loomed in my mind as a long-yearned-for sacred place since the 1980s.  One of my first bookstores was the Golden Bough in Mt. Shasta.  Missie Gillespie was the manager or owner, I can't remember which, but she has stayed in my mind all these years.  I never met her, only talked to her on the phone.  In fact, she was one of the last orders I filled for Psycards before my divorce in 1991 and in the end I sent her the last decks I had when I had to move to a small apartment, and US Games had taken over the Psycards business.  A sad time in my life during which I lost everything that had defined my life. 

After 25 years of yearning, I was on my way to Mount Shasta and I began to feel her presence even before I could see her. I felt her strong Mother Energy, her otherworldy connections and I felt as though I was on a pilgrimage to the Sacred Mountain.

It began with tiny glimpses of white on the horizon--is that a cloud or a mountain?  No, it's a mountain, definitely a mountain.  Is that Mount Shasta?  It has to be, I determined as I consulted my maps.

At last we were in the presence of the Mother Mountain.  I could feel other energy connections to this place--as if it were a hub from which other energy lines radiated to other mystical places.  It felt very strongly like it linked back in time, too, back in time and to the West, to the ancient Lemurians, perhaps, to the star people, to some lost place of human history.

We stayed a the KOA campground there, at the base of the mountain for a day or so, until finances dictated that we move again if we wanted to get to our destination of Oregon.

Camping at KOA.

View of the mountain from KOA.

Another view from KOA.

I spent quite a bit of time walking in the woods and meditating in the aura of Mount Shasta over the next couple of days.  But I also had the feeling that there was the spectre of decline haunting the town itself.  It felt like a town that might one day soon be nearly empty or abandoned.  Later, I heard reports from the townspeople about the drought and its impact on the local economy--no snow means no skiing, no skiing means no tourism in the winter, their biggest season.  Local businesses are barely staying afloat.

The Mountain doesn't care about such things--she has much bigger things to contemplate.  She felt as though she was humming with some sort of internal activity that made us little grasping humans seem irrelevant, unless we were there to worship in some way.

After having our brakes fail and nearly running through a plate glass window--fortunately a steel sign post stopped us!--we were forced to borrow money for repairs and get on the road as quickly as possible to find a home spot.  So worried and feeling urgent, we pushed forward toward Eugene.