as small as a world and as large as alone

Easiest questions first:  The second two questions are undoubtedly yes, and yes, because what matters most is your connectedness to a place, not when you connected with it, I suspect.  

Then the hard question:  I don’t really know how to explain what it feels like.  Lots of different religions have things like… Catholics can have a vocation, and I think that differs from person to person in how it manifests.  I suspect the same is true of this, which is going to be much less well-known-about than a vocation in a large-scale religion.

In my case, what kept happening were all these various signs in my life telling me to look, and look hard, at that specific time and place.  Especially whenever I was very ill and sometimes close to dying, that’s when it became the clearest.  For awhile I’d get sidetracked by details, like I’d have intense dreams about “the place I was born” except that visually they’d look nothing like where I was born (a lot of my dreams are like that, with the identity of a person/place/thing divorced entirely from its visual appearance).  And the harder I looked, the more I kept seeing signs telling me to look at this place and time, look at this place and time, look at this place and time.

And then I began noticing sort of a fabric of connections woven throughout my life that all stemmed from that place and time, and then I started seeing ways I needed to honor that fabric of connections, and also ways I had been honoring that fabric of connections all along without even realizing it.  And the reverence I’d always had for the Mother Tree (which I’d gone back to visit many times over the years), and experiences I’d had there.  And it was basically like all different lines throughout every time and place in my life pointed back to this one place.  And there were meanings to a lot of things in that place that don’t really translate, and shouldn’t be tried to be translated, into words.  But all those lines, and all those meanings, and the connections to my existing spiritual beliefs, and a strong sense that I needed to follow wherever this led me, and that I needed to give something back, in whatever way I could, to honor my own connections to this place, and what I’d been given by it, and… other things that don’t translate well.

You don’t have to believe me or anything.  All that matters to me is my own relationship to the place.  Other people can decide that it’s mostly filling some psychological need, or anything else, and that’s fine with me, as long as I’m free to do what I need to do and they aren’t outright cruel to me about it.  But I’ve definitely gotten other responses suggesting other people experience things like this.  Whether it’s “real” or not (which in a sense doesn’t matter to me, all that matters is the effect on my life, which is positive), it at least doesn’t seem to be unique.

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