We took a quick field trip to Heavenly Mountain in Boone, North Carolina.
I have to admit something and that is that I had never been in a meditative labyrinth until I drove to Heavenly Mountain at the recommendation of my friend Tom.
Heavenly Mountain is just outside of Boone, and it’s a transcendental meditation center where people once traveled from all over the world to refine their meditative practices inside structures that looked like they had just stepped out of the Bhagavad Gita.
The large meeting hall is guarded by two giant swans. There are multiple buildings on this giant compound, including some his and her apartment complexes named after what I can only guess are transcendental states, or characters from an ancient text, or totally made up. The apartments, which once housed meditative men and women in separate quarters, now are helping carry the financial burden of the dilapidating property by housing Appalachian State students in a co-ed arrangement.
At the bottom of the long stairs leading up to the giant swans there’s a grass-level meditative labyrinth in which you walk around meditatively before reaching the center and circling back outward in very deliberate fashion on a usually-windswept North Carolina hillside. I can only imagine the concentrative effort required to make it to the labyrinth’s center and the soul’s center when the temps drop into the teens and the wind is howling at 30 or 40 miles per hour.
I took my kids one day just to show them this place, seemingly a semi-operating remnant of a bygone meditative era, and before I could say anything they darted from the car to the labyrinth’s core in about five irreverent seconds where they found this strange rock covering what looked like a charred piece of paper with an indecipherable scrawled note.
“What’s this?” my daughter asked, with a breeze disintegrating the already-tattered edges of the paper.
“You probably shouldn’t touch that,” I told her. “That’s probably someone’s sacred note.”
They ran up the sacred stairs toward the swans and did dance poses in the horizon brightness of the swan setting sun.
“We should go,” I said.
Namaste.