Where a particular action takes place has always seemed important to me.

As a child I can remember feeling an envelopment, a kind of friendly hugging, as I explored the campgrounds where Tuscarora people had lived and fought and died along the Chenango River north of Binghamton in New York state where I grew up.

I remember feeling a remoteness as I climbed around the remains of burial mounds on a hill a ways past our house. That whole rural area is now covered with houses. As boys we found relics of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars where the armies had attempted crossings of one hill in particular, where the meadows, moss, and oaks, not the soldiers on either side, had become the real victors.

Now, much later in this life, and well across the country from where I lived as a child, what I recognized as spiritual energies were again moving me to explore, and they seemed directly linked to a place – the Central Willamette Valley in the state of Oregon where my wife and I bought an old farm, which is still my home today. The Marys River flows less than a quarter mile south of the farm. It comes from the Coastal Mountains and the sacred vision quest sentinel Tcha Te Man Wei to our west. That mountain, it is said, has the power to attract spiritually aware people to the area.