Side Quest toward the Sacred (2025)

A couple of years ago, I heard about a place in Oregon called the Vedanta Retreat. It’s a privately owned religious/spiritual retreat center that claims 289 acres with trails weaving throughout, dotted with shrines to all the major world religions, and a few minor dieties and saints.

While I am not a religious person, I am eternally curious about and fascinated by religions and by people’s expressions of faith. I enjoy exploring what different people hold sacred, what they label profane, what they value and what they denigrate. The idea of a retreat space dedicated not to a single religion or deity, but to many religions and their competing deities felt revelatory. As a humanities scholar, this felt like a necessary side quest. I added it to my Oregon bucket list, and there it sat. Waiting.

I originally planned to take my spouse, who is also curious about religions and faith, but the timing just never worked out. Then, last weekend, after a deep anxiety spiral provoked by the news that my emergency paid medical leave might actually be unpaid, he encouraged me to take the day off for self-care and re-centering. I agreed and started with a morning therapy session. After my therapy session it felt extra important to really give myself the time and space to “feel my feelings” and acknowledge them, and what they are telling me about what I needed in this moment. A spiritual, multi-faith retreat hike in the woods seemed oddly fitting for this mission. In the words of the Indigo Girls, “I went in seeking clarity.”

When I got to the retreat, a delightful older woman approached, apparently she lives near the center and walks up the road from her house to hike on the grounds pretty regularly. She had absolutely infectious positive and welcoming energy. After filling me in on how things worked and which gate led most directly to which shrines and trails, she walked off toward the sunshine (orange) gate, and I continued through the forest (green) gate feeling like I’d just been blessed by one of the fae.

I will openly admit, I did not do justice to myself or this space on this first attempt. I had the map, and I had a plan, and… I had a time crunch, which is not the ideal mental state to approach a sacred side quest. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the two hours I spent meandering the trails, going down side paths to various shrines, occasionally getting lost in the underbrush when the map made it look like two trails met up, when in reality, they dodged each other’s reaching tendrils, and seeing just how many gods, saints and prophets I could “meet.”

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I had the opportunity to see the majority of the shrines, but I didn’t have the inner calm to slow down and truly absorb any of them. It probably didn’t help that I felt like an interloper in someone else’s sacred space. A brash tourist bumbling through, taking pictures of things that didn’t belong to me. But then… there was also the forest – MY sacred space. And there, I lingered. I dawdled. I breathed deeply in, and exhaled fully out. I stilled. I stopped racing and simply was.

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Ultimately, I think that is the power of this place – that it brings so many elements of the sacred together under one tight circle of never ending sky. It reminds us in ways both tangible and ephemeral, that we have so much more in common than we recognize, that the differences we allow to divide us are so small, and so few, and ultimately, so insignificant.

This space reminded me of two of the books my parents raised me on – both old hippie tomes; I Am Also A You and Be Here Now. Both of these books remind their readers that we are all connected. We are all one. When I met my husband, he would often tell me about Old Turtle. Finally, he brought me a copy of his childhood book, Old Turtle and the Broken Truth, which was his parents’ version of the same lesson.

“You are loved. And so are They.”

When I emerged from the forest, and drove down off the hilltop, I tried to carry some of that feeling back with me. I knew I would need it as I returned to work. This past week, I have had ample time to remember the other maxim from my childhood, first introduced to me in the movie Razor’s Edge: “It’s easy to be Buddha on a mountain.” It’s much harder to hold onto that peace when you’re being jostled through the human grist mill of late stage capitalism with fascism rising, but hold it we must.

I am posting this now to remind myself, and maybe you, that spaces like this exist. That there are people, and groups, who also believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all people. That there are spaces that are being held open to welcome all people, just as they are. That our differences do not have to divide us, indeed, they can be the most powerful call to unity, equity, justice and peace.

Side Quest toward the Sacred (2025)
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