"Mill Pond, North East, PA." 
                                                                                              Postcard
                                                                                              Private collection

When I was very young in rural western Pennsylvania, on a winding road descending into a valley outside a small town de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme there were old mills.  Not wind, obviously, but millls driven by a once-rushing creek, and there were ponds.  I can't remember which pond this one is, whether it was across the road from the house where we lived (which had started out as the mill owner's house a hundred and fifty years before my family came along), or whether it was the pond at the other end of the road, higher up and closer to town.  I'm not sure.

Although there had been several mills, the area was called Paper Mill Hollow, evidently singling out the important one.  Which was more accurately speaking a grist mill, which somehow didn't sound as nice.  Even more genteel and leaving out the industrial angle altogether would have meant going simply with "The Valley," which my mother preferred, as in "When we lived in the Valley."  

"Happy Valley," my father would occasionally add, which tended to subtract a little from the "How Green Was My" wistuflness  that resonated in my mother's version.

When I go deep sometimes, on the occasional shamanic journey or guided meditation or in a craniosacral therapy session, I always seem to end up back there.  I find myself entering through the covered bridge over the creek that was pulled down as a hazard and replaced when I was barely old enough to remember.  But then pretty much everything I see on these journeys -- the orchard, house, woods, pond -- are long gone.  The mills of course had ceased working ages before I arrived.  They are ruins I pass along the way.  The other changes have come later, in my lifetime.  Sometimes I am on foot.  Sometimes I am flying over.  It depends.  I hear things too.  Music, sometimes.  This latest session included a cello solo.   

After my session yesterday, my therapist asked me to describe my experience, and I asked him to tell me what he'd done.  We are both a little reticent about sharing, or at any rate I am.  I'm always disoriented afterward too.  I understand there are pressure points that open up windows between the chakras in the lower body (Earth) and the energy centers in the head (Sky).  I want him to do these pressure points.  I want to see through these windows, although that is not quite an accurate description of what happens.  Still, I have heard great healing and intense spiritual insight are possible if the therapist does certain special holds, except I can't quite remember what they're called.  Once I asked him if he would do "Windows on the World" and he reminded me (gently) that this was a place I had been to that doesn't exist anymore.  I said that was true of most of the places I go to in these sessions. 

About this particular journey, I tell him I found myself resisting.  I thought I had fought it.   He talked about the archetype of the Red Knight, who is always going into battle against foes which turn out to be of his own invention. He fights himself. 

My homework is to make a list of my windmills.   I come home and get distracted.  What I find out is that Pablo Casals made his debut in 1904 at Carnegie Hall, playing Richard Strauss's Don Quixote.  

I am working on my list, but it isn't easy.  Ponds in the woods, patterns in the trees, familiar sounds are easy.  Mills I know.  Windmills are hard.  Probably because their meaning is elusive and hidden, and so what I see, out of the corner of my eye, are things to be wary of.  Meaning in general is difficult to get to.  There are some battles you have to fight anyway.  I don't think the shadows moving in the distance are windmills, but even if they are I don't know what they mean.  I am working on that. 

Still, you never know.  They might be giants.