I have been going through many challenging days lately.  Many make me question my path, my career, and where we live.  Life is suppose to test you, sometimes daily.  But, man oh man, I've been feeling as though it's tests are getting harder, and I am getting older and don't feel as strong.

What it is doing is encouraging me to stand back and observe before taking on the challenge of the test.  Watch the roller coaster before getting on and mastering it.  This is cyclic, I know, but it could get easier, couldn't it?  Although sometimes it just smacks me upside the head with a big old surprise just to make sure that I'm still paying attention.

The question that I've had running through my mind since autumn was the decision to live here anymore.  There are many reasons why we moved here, and many reasons why we need to or should move.  There is still the feeling of being temporarily here.  I really want a place that I feel in my soul that I am going to be in until I die.  But is there such a place anymore?

I walk out to my stonehenge, leave my offerings and ask, "Guide me."  The pictures above made me sit back and think.  I'm asking for a place, a place that is sacred in my soul.  A place where I feel I cannot leave.  Although I believe I need to move to another place, in my soul, I cannot leave this place...well just not sell it to anyone else.  I couldn't fathom someone else in this house, touching this land.  So, is this my answer?  But I still wonder, what makes a place sacred?

While building a tree deck for the kids, our dog seemed secure and safe within the circle, always laying within the center.  He would even "peek" around one of the stones to see what was going on "outside" the circle.  Then, about two months later our trail camera took the other picture.  A small buck, found often within the circle, even after I had stopped leaving offerings.  By the pictures, the does walk around the outside, but not the bucks.  

My husband came home one day to a very large buck in the side yard.  He had walked around the corner of the house and there he stood, large and unmoved by my husband's presence.  The buck turned and slowly walked up to the walnut tree and where the tree deck was being built and my husband followed.  The buck stopped inside stonehenge.  They stood there, sizing each other up for a few moments when my husband decided that he should back away and leave the buck alone.

Then I had the surprise to see the small buck again on the trail camera inside stonehenge and peeking around nearly the same stone as our dog had a couple months before.

I have decided that this is a special place.  There is meaning here, safety here, security here.  I don't believe that all sacred places are ancient. I believe that some are natural and sometimes undiscovered.  They may be a place that only becomes sacred to those that discover them, only to gain power as time goes on and the discoverers care for it.

Why did I put stonehenge there?  I will never really know.  It was one of the first things I felt compelled to do when we first bought this place.  The property that it is on wasn't even part of my grandmother's property.  It was neglected.  There once was a house that stood there, my dad had bought the property and worked on tearing the house down.  But he was told that he couldn't build on it because it wasn't large enough to put a septic system on and he wasn't able to tap into my grandmother's.  So, the property sat, became over grown and forgotten.  

The stones used in stonehenge were the foundation stones from the old house.  And although it took me several years to complete (even though I don't think that it will ever really be fully complete), it is as complete as I wanted it to be from the beginning.

It feels still when I stand in the center and sometimes I feel invisible.  

I don't believe that it became sacred because I prayed there.  Nor did it become sacred because I left offerings there.  I believe it always has been sacred for one reason or another.  Maybe because of some type of rock, or soil, or tree, or what once was there.  I don't think I will ever really know.  But I was pulled there, like dowsing rods to place stonehenge in that spot. 

So how can I leave it?  I don't know.  I do know that if we ever do move, this house is paid for, it is all ours, it won't go anywhere, it will always be ours.  My little sacred space.