Pulpit Rock is the North point in my Blue Mountains Circle of Eight. A pulpit is a raised place within a church, where a speaker stands. Standing on Pulpit Rock and looking around me I see a church built not by humans but by the earth itself. We call this place the Blue Mountains but actually it’s a plateau, lifted up by volcanic activity around 170 million years ago. Pulpit Rock has nearly 360 degree views of vertical cliff, deep folded valley and curving lines of tree tops. I feel small there, but also expanded, reminded of my capacity for the appreciation of beauty and my connection to this living planet we are all a part of.
Photos don’t really do it justice. Up here the process of creation and the interplay of the elements can literally be seen. A waterfall pours down one cliff face, reminding up how rivers and streams carve their way into the landscape, helping to create the dramatic cliffs and valleys. The exposed rock we see exposed in layers of the cliff is soft here, which assists the water to collapse whole sections of land as the coal and shale sections are worn away, leaving the sandstone also to be eaten into. As this process happens, the rivers drop further down. When fire sweeps over this country it allows for even swifter erosion. Wind pours down the valley, or swirls upwards; mists curl in to hide and disclose sections of scenery, clouds lower or advance in like a wall from the east, bearing the storm front with them.
It’s a dramatic place and perfect for the North in my Circle of Eight. Not only does it literally sit in the north, hooking over above the rest of the Circle on the map, but in the southern hemisphere the North is aligned with the Summer Solstice; a festival of drama and beauty as opposites meet and join in union. I’ve already conducted a wedding there, late one morning with twenty or so people gathered to celebrate the marriage of their friends. It had been raining heavily for days, but cleared on this morning in time for the ceremony. It was cold and still, the waterfall pouring with the recent rains and a rainbow lay in the valley below us.
The ceremony was elemental, informal and simple. After we’d finished and a few photos had been taken we saw the rain advancing towards us, bringing its blessings to the waterfalls and all the green living life, as well any humans who stayed outside to welcome it. Like Pulpit Rock, the Summer Solstice is a high point in the landscape, in this case the landscape of the year and the eight festivals that describe and celebrate its turning. It’s a time of joy and ferocity but its brief, just like the wedding ceremony, and Pulpit Rock itself is tiny in the surrounding landscape. One can only balance at the high point for a short time, gathering up visions and blessings, before everything shifts and we’re moving again, somewhere else.
The first time I ever went to this North point it was so heavily shrouded in mist – cloud, really – that we literally could see nothing but white. There was an enormous sense of space beneath us and all around, as if the piece of land we stood on hovered by itself, in the midst of vast nothingness; which when you see it without the obscuring cloud, is pretty much the case. Up here the elements are fierce, just like at the Summer Solstice. If it rains, you’ll be drenched. In a high wind I imagine it could be terrifying. In hot sunshine it would be baking, blindingly overwhelming and in cloud one is barely attached to the earth.
I can’t wait to see it under moonlight and learn which way the shadows fall. To come at dawn and see it waking up. To spend time there waiting to see what the winds will whisper to me or to stand on the lowest platform of the lookout and sing with my friends. It’s like a new relationship, the connection I have with this place, where I have met with it deeply a few times and am entranced, falling in love, yearning to know more but not impatient. I feel it hovering there on the edge of my consciousness, calling to me and beginning to take its place in a Circle that isn’t complete yet. But its pinned onto the map at the high point of the North, just like that sticking-out rock pins itself into the valley and all the way down to the core of the earth, while still reaching up into air and aether.