Design of Sacred Landscape for a Spiritual Community (1)
Sacred landscapes speak to us. By listening closely, a landscape architect can find inspiration for designing any project. Whether part of a spiritual path, academic research or foundation for creating a particular place, an investigation of sacred landscapes provides guidelines for designing a landscape intending to cohabit space in a balanced and harmonious relationship with the natural and social environment.
Inspired by sacred landscape, the design of landscape for a spiritual community is a most challenging and rewarding aspect of work for a landscape architect; providing opportunity to give physical expression to a place in which to practice spiritual and philosophically sound ways of living - imaginative rendering of turning dream into expression … giving expression to visions of enchantment or paradise, pure land or heaven … transforming heaven into landscape.
Because of the broadening spiritual awareness of the landscape and the harmonious manner in which more people are inclined to effectively become an integral part of it, a varied spectrum of the population is articulating greater need for provision of spaces and places to accommodate philosophy, contemplative ritual and practice of spiritual activity.
(We also hear articulation for the need to give high priority to identification and protection of sacred landscapes in preparing official plans; while at the same time, discouraging permit-granting agencies from enabling developers to run rampant with misguided schemes over places designated with spiritual value).
For the most part, communities such as First Nations people have long sanctified and given identity to sacred landscapes as integral components of life -- as respected as the air we breathe, the water we drink and lands upon which we call home. Those living off the land have learned a humbling regard for the operations of nature - known through direct experience that places sustain life when respected; incapacitate life when it is not. For others, respect for these special places has been cultivated and practiced through participation in the environmental movements of the last decades, a re-emergent political force in our society.
Invigorating, uplifting vitality often is to be found at places identified and protected as sacred landscape, both natural and designed. This energy also may be discovered in the midst of intentional communities or centres established for spiritual activity, often located in the vicinity of a sacred landscape, taking advantage of the emanation of potent life forces, and the respect afforded to these sites.
Likely, a heightened awareness at these centres may be due to the concentration and intensity of people's engaging in a coordinated commitment to its viability. However, when designing and constructing the landscapes of exterior spaces and buildings for spiritual activities, much is left to be desired, regardless of the good and well-meaning intentions to integrate one's activities with the operations of nature and emanation of life forces flowing through the land. Designed spaces and buildings intended to merge physical, mental and spiritual realms, the aspects of our minds to which some refer as heaven and earth, are significantly less than effective. Why?
Those involved with its design have not sufficiently cultivated the tools - coarse and subtle … physical, mental and spiritual - required to undertake this work. Architects, landscape architects and planners have insufficient background, knowledge and understanding of the vast and wealthy storehouse of information and applied wisdom serving as foundation for designing sacred landscape for a spiritual community.
Furthermore, both those possessing a high regard for spiritual life and those with highly developed spiritual acumen, students and teachers alike, rely on simple intuition - perhaps cultivated through particular meditation practices, and aided by tools and techniques based on signs received through oracles and divination - without sufficient knowledge about how the landscape speaks and the operations of nature responsible for the changing character of lands and waters … without sufficient grounding in historical research and precedents … without sufficient background in the use of design tools and techniques developed through knowledge of environmental and socially responsible approaches … and without sufficient awareness in how to translate a spiritually enriched way of life into landscape.
As landscape architects, we have a responsibility to comprehensively broaden our understanding of the signs and characteristics of the sacred landscape, and uncover linkages that can be translated and integrated into a design vocabulary, recognizable to one's cultural traditions, applicable to design of any public and private place.
The cosmic voice suggests that landscape architects revise the analytical and intuitive methods generally given unwarranted attention, get removed from the keyboard and rediscover meaning in spaces of the natural world.
How to proceed along this path? Where to turn for inspiration?
My investigations into better understanding the opportunities available to approach the design of sacred landscapes for spiritual community required posing several fundamental questions - of what tools and techniques must I be aware in order to design a landscape for facilitating meditation? What particular design ability and spiritual development must be cultivated in order to undertake such a task? What are the mundane and subtle features and characteristics of a landscape enhancing meditation? How did particular landscapes come to be identified, designated and invested with sacred qualities and characteristics? What is it to be realized and understood in a designed sacred landscape?
With my initial engagements of this work, I developed a foundation upon which to ground design of the landscape for spiritual community derived from specific fields of research, enumerated in Perspective 2:1999. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to take pilgrimage to landscapes held sacred by practitioners of spiritual traditions for direct experience of these places.
The most profound discovery: the most inspirational design is grounded by an intimate understanding of natural systems and social factors giving character and profound meaning to the spirit of the landscape; strengthened by its designers' having cultivated a sense of well-being, with visions to clear the mind from delusions, obstructions and ignorance. I believe landscape architects would find all of this to be necessary for cultivating any degree of expertise. Those who do will be gratified with joyful reward.
1:1999