Landscapes of the Sacred: Locus Mirabilis

This family was on a road trip and as they were coming up to Galesville, Wisconsin they saw nothing about the place. The father mentioned that it had looked like the same Wisconsin Prairie they had been seeing throughout the whole car ride. To them it was ordinary, but according to the insight of a nineteenth century prophet, they had entered God's first garden (The Garden of Eden).

Upon approaching the Mississippi River, the father said that he immediately felt more aware of the variety of trees present. This excerpt reminded me of our class hike on the Noland Trail when Dr. Redick was asking the class what type of trees were surrounding us.

At the beginning I thought the father would discover this place to be holy, but he was not able to enter the sacred place. Initially it seemed like he was experiencing flow when he left his family to hunt for more information on the Garden of Eden and attempted to look at everything according to how the Bible described the Garden, but I guessed wrong. "We wistfully seek an arcane cosmos through every leaf and branch, longing for the ordinary to be revealed as holy."

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