Sacred Ground

I have always travelled towards old stone. My sense of what healing is got its shape in places where people have prayed, grieved and given thanks for thousands of years. These are notes from a few of them: what the ground felt like, and what I carried home.

Angkor Wat

Siem Reap · a Khmer temple-city begun in the early twelfth century

Angkor was built as a map of the universe in stone. The five central towers rise as Mount Meru, the mountain at the centre of the world where the gods live, and the wide moat around them stands for the ocean at its edge. I felt that order before anyone explained it to me. The spirituality does not sit behind glass here. It lifts off the stones, warm and worn smooth by centuries of hands.

C A M B O D I A

The Pyramids of Giza

Cairo's edge · the last ancient wonder still standing

The pyramids are older than almost everything we call ancient. Four and a half thousand years (the mainstream says this I believe they're so much older), set down at the edge of the desert with their corners aimed at true north so precisely that it still unsettles the people who measure them. Up close they are not smooth and golden the way the postcards promise. They are vast blocks the colour of the sand, and you feel the weight of them in your chest before you reach the base. I went expecting a monument. I found something that hums, and I could not stand in it without leaving something of my own. In each corner I placed a crystal I had gathered in Portugal, a quiet dedication to the world for everlasting peace and goodwill, set into the largest resonant field I could find.

E G Y P T

The Maya World

The Yucatán, the green hills of Belize and Tikal in the Guatemalan jungle

The Maya world is not one place but a green thread running through three countries. In the Yucatán I climbed down into cenotes, the freshwater sinkholes the Maya read as doorways to the underworld, and understood at once why they thought so. In Belize the land turned lush and tropical, green through the hills and all along the Hummingbird Highway, and a medicinal herb tour through a botanical garden there spoke straight to the herbalist in me: the plants I work with in tinctures and teas, growing wild and generous out of the ground. At Tikal in Guatemala the temples push up through the rainforest canopy while howler monkeys roar from somewhere you cannot see. This was a people who mapped the sky and the seasons with astonishing care, and the jungle has been holding their cities ever since. Standing on that ground, you feel watched in the gentlest way.

M E X I C O - B E L I Z E - G U A T E M A L A

Teotihuacán

Near Mexico City · a city so old the Aztecs found it already ancient

Teotihuacán is a puzzle the size of a city. Everyone calls it Aztec, but the Aztecs did not build it. They arrived centuries after it was already ancient and abandoned, were awed by it, and gave it the name we still use, which means something close to the place where the gods were made. Who actually raised the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon, and laid the great Avenue of the Dead between them, we honestly do not know. Standing on that avenue, I vibrated like nowhere else I have ever been. Whatever was set into this ground has not switched off.

M E X I C O

Petra & the Dead Sea

Rose-red stone and the lowest place on earth

Petra hides itself. You walk a long narrow gorge with the rock rising sheer and close on both sides, and then it opens without warning onto the Treasury, a temple front carved straight into a cliff the colour of a rose. The Nabataeans made a whole city this way, out of the living stone, two thousand years ago. Down at the Dead Sea I did the thing everyone does and floated, held up by water so mineral-heavy you cannot sink, at the lowest point on the whole surface of the earth. People have come to that shore to heal their skin and their aches for as long as there are records. I left Jordan lighter than I arrived, in every sense.

J O R D A N

Rajasthan

Udaipur, Jodhpur and Jaisalmer, with the Taj Mahal at Agra

Rajasthan arrives as colour. Udaipur white and floating on its lakes, Jodhpur washed blue beneath its great fort, and out in the Thar desert, Jaisalmer rising the exact gold of the stone it is cut from, a walled town where people still live inside the fort itself. The devotion here is loud and daily and everywhere: in the temples, the music, the marigolds strung across every doorway. And then, a little way east, the Taj Mahal, the most beautiful building I have stood in front of and, at heart, a grief made in marble by a man for the wife he lost. I did not expect a wonder of the world to feel so tender.

I N D I A

Bo-tanics Aroma-Herbary

W E L C O M E T O T H E G A R D E N