Thursday, October 21, 2004
The Evanescence of Coincidental Holiness
The east side of the park is highly structured - lawns and meadows, paths and edifices weave artfully among themselves, bordered by groomed foliage and carefully orchestrated watercourses. As the park spills west to the ocean, it grows wilder and ruder till eventually the only paths curl in murky shadow amidst juniper groves, untended, dark and secret. But smack in the middle there’s a spot that’s the best of both worlds - the gorgeous victorian vistas and brambles of Stow Lake and Strawberry Hill. To the east is the formality of the museum concourse and Japanese Tea Garden; to the south, the botanist’s playground of the Strybing Arboretum; to the west, the start of forests that surround the Polo Fields and blanket the park, marching to the sea.... The path from my house to the lake crests a small hill that bridges two very different parts of one amazing park.
Ten years or so ago, this little zone, behind the Tea Garden and next to the old stone steps up to the lake, was a dumping ground. Old chunks of monestary limestone (imported from Spain, no less!) lay crumbling amidst ivy and redwood; plant-waste mouldered in a casual compost, and a traffic barrier had been abandoned in the bushes near the intersection of three rude paths, controlling the transit of the skunks and raccoons. This traffic barrier was concrete cylinder about four feet tall, three in diameter, gently rounded to a globular convexity on top. It stood on end in dappled sunlight, quietly serving out its endless days where nasturtiums tangled and danced.
Not too far from this location stands the local Indian consulate. That may help explain how the local community soon recognized this concrete bollard for what it was - a lingam, significantly bigger than life and comfortably ensconced in a coincidentally propitious grotto. Someone left a flower atop it; someone else, an orange beside it; then later, some incense burning next to it.... An *om* was carefully drawn on it with colorful chalk; it was retouched if rains smeared it and the people cleaned up around it and tended it with gentle respect. It had become, spontaneously, a local shrine.
I could feel the karma, the kavanah of those who worshipped there each time I went past, the sweet scents and lovely colors they left behind mere physcial manifestations of something much richer and more numinous. What once served only to stop cars and confound drivers had evolved into a focusing-lens for positive behavior. The uplifted meditations offered there softly resonated among the tall trees and filtered into and out of the redwood chips covering the ground. It had become a holy place, purely by virture of having been recognized as one.
And therefore, it was disappeared. The city was nervous about maintaining a religious site on public land - even though it was clear this shrine was effectively maintenance-free, even though a fifty-foot stone cross commemorating Drake’s use of English prayers in California in the 16th century stood by a waterfall not a mile away. But this lingham shrine, this place of accidental holiness, somehow set city leaders off, and the order came down to make it go away.
It was spirited off in the night, taken to a private garage in lieu of being utterly destroyed. A local yogi set it up in his garage, out of the rain and appropriately accomodated and festooned, but that was way down in the south of the city in a neighborhood I never visit even in my car, much less on a casual stroll in my local park.
After they yanked the lingam, the whole area got a makeover. The limestone monestary stones were excavated and rehabilitated, and now appear in a very interesting water garden in the arboretum; the ivy and nasturtium were pulled out and replanted with wildflowers and hedges; even a redwood was taken down… and then the earth was transformed and a new grove was installed where the old one had stood. It’s a fine grove, too, and as it grows in I’m sure it will continue to look and feel progressively better. But I can’t help it; I remember the grotto as it once was; I know how it used to be - and I know something is missing every time I walk that path.
I couldn’t find a photo of the site as I remember it, but here’s an excerpt of an article on the subject. I can’t vouch for the source of the story, but then again, I can’t vouch for the source of the lingam or the energy it seemed to generate. I can just tell you, whatever it was, it really was. A few years ago a concrete traffic bollard was dumped by a truck driver in a remote part of Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. In 1989 it was discovered by local mystic, Baba Kali Dass who declared it to be a Shiva lingam. By 1993, the bollard was attracting thousands of New-Age, Hindu and buddhist pilgrims, and claims of miraculous cures were circulating. A stone circle was constructed around the bollard, and in October 1993, the devotees asked for permission to build a permanent shrine. Park officials threatened to demolish the bollard, and Kali Dass’s group filed a federal lawsuit, invoking the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom.
