Miracle Lake
CHAPTER 138
Miracle Lake
The story for the full moon time:
June 21 – Jul 4
MOON DETAILS
Full Moon
1°07′ Capricorn
Jun 21, 2024
9:07 PM EST
REFLECTION DATES
July 2020
Jan. 11 – Feb. 8, 2024
12 MINUTE READ
As the water vanished from the lake, the moisture left my body.
My mouth became so dry I struggled to swallow, struggled to breathe. I was constantly sipping water, trying to make up for the saliva my glands were no longer producing. And Look out for your eyes, the doctor warned, said that because of my limited lacrimal production, even the slightest bit of debris could scratch my corneas.
I stopped being able to wear my contacts and instead, wore glasses every day. Their lenses — a shield, guarding my eyes from wind and dirt.
Everything ached. My bones, my joints. Ridges formed across my nails, and my skin itched beneath my clothes.
I was exhausted. My thoughts blurred behind a weary haze.
This was what it felt like to be drained of water — the life-giving stuff that accounts for half the human body.
By the time I turned twenty-three, I was struggling to hold the stuff, and on symptoms alone, I was diagnosed with Sjögrens Syndrome — an autoimmune disease that attacks your moisture-producing glands.
Of course, I knew nothing then about the lake, simultaneously losing its water.
Scientists believe that it first formed some 6,000 years ago when a landslide in Virginia dammed a stream and deposited a city of stone — now called Garden of the Gods.
Over the years, the lake’s water level was known to fluctuate, but for centuries, it remained mostly full. That was until 2008, when I got sick, the water disappeared completely, and the lake became nothing more than a reddish-brown, muddy pit.
The lake’s owners, who’d built a business around its glistening waters, stood stunned at the sight of rotting fish. All the life of the lake, suddenly deprived of water, died on the spot.
By 2012, after years of watching their business tumble, they’d had enough. They called in the help of geologists and asked what they could do to restore the water. In November of that year, the geologists got to work, plugging the channels in the basin through which the water is believed to have descended into the earth. But the lake, they soon realized, is the only one of its kind on the planet.
It rises and falls in a natural cycle, emptying itself completely every 400 years. This, they determined, is actually a healing process. A way for the lake to remove all of the silt it’d collected and clear itself out. Because of this, the geologists didn’t want to completely impede the channels and destroy what made the lake unique. They simply wanted to expedite the process, to help the healing happen faster.
Thanks to their efforts, by February 2013, water had begun returning to the lake, and in a curious coincidence of timing, I too began to heal.
The very month the geologists started their work, I moved to New York City, started meditating, and slowly, my symptoms improved.
I was no longer constantly thirsty and afraid for my eyes. The ridges on my nails disappeared. But still, some symptoms lingered. Hives appeared every night across my back, and I had to be mindful of how I spent my energy so I wouldn’t run out.
Simultaneously, the geologists stood at the edge of Mountain Lake, a bit stumped because for some reason, the water stopped rising. After having filled just a few acres of the lake’s previous fifty, the lake’s level was stuck.
For years, it remained like this — no longer completely empty, but also, not yet full.
During that same time, meditation shifted my perspective. Slowly, carefully, I began observing the parts of my experience I’d previously failed to notice or simply dismissed. I heard whispers in my ears and saw visions in my mind, and as the visions came true, that which I previously deemed crazy was actually beginning to make a lot of sense.
It was almost like my mind had been cleared of all the dirt it’d accumulated over the years, and now, I could see what was there — a series of enchanting, magical events.
I felt healthier and healthier.
The hives disappeared.
And while I still needed plenty of rest, I attributed this to the basic needs of my human body and a growing belief in the power of potential energy in a culture where the kinetic is valued most.
I felt waves of energy — rising and falling, rising and falling — all around and inside me, and I learned to trust this cycle. A cycle, which I came to believe, is just as essential to magic as water is to life.
For magic cannot flow through a system of pure kinetic energy.
It requires a balance of kinetic and potential — motion and stillness — which allows all energy to remain constant regardless of whatever friction it encounters.
And between 2012 and 2020, I felt as though I was coming into balance. As if bounded in a lake of constant energy, I felt my power increase. I felt it burning through the palms of my hands, and I heard in my mind that I was like the wind. I heard the song singing, She’s like the wind, and I sat up from child’s pose on my yoga mat in my kitchen in Queens, and I looked up and saw a book on the shelf.
I’d bought it years before and had never bothered to read it, but in that moment, I picked it up and opened randomly to page 201. My eyes landed on two lines of text — centered in bold at the top of the page:
You are the midwife
of the Witch Waking Up.
And I heard the wind like waves in my ears, and I fell back on the couch and closed my eyes and a voice commanded me to REMEMBER.
In my mind’s eye, I saw two strands of magic: the still, the receptive, the mystic — full of potential — and the active, the commanding, the witch — full of kinetic power.
I saw these two strands woven like DNA. I saw them reaching through my arms and legs and out my mouth with every breath. They floated through the air in invisible threads of moisture, held in the water that had slowly been returning for years, and eight days later, a message arrived.
It landed in my inbox, sent from a woman who lived over 4,000 miles away. It told me (for the first time) about a lake in the mountains of Virginia, a lake that had been empty for years but now, for some unknown reason, was rapidly filling with water.
A miracle! They called it. The sudden rush of water that appeared in July.
And maybe I wouldn’t have thought anything of it except…the lake just happens to be located in Giles County, Virginia, on the very land where centuries ago, my ancestors lived.
I wondered what the lake looked like then. I wondered if my ancestors crossed it as a stream, swam it in the summer, or perhaps, witnessed both its rise and fall.
I heard the song again in my mind — She’s like the wind — as I read about the lake and how it was full in the fall of 1986, back when I was born and the movie Dirty Dancing was filmed in its waters.
Three days passed, and in the early morning of July 18, 2020, I was unexpectedly awoken from my sleep. In my mind’s eye, I was taken to another land, high above my earthly body, and there, I stood in a circle of thrones. Everyone around me radiated love, and I felt completely safe.
For the next three years of my life, I visited this imaginal place regularly. I called it “the throne room,” and perhaps because of the timing of its appearance, I took to associating it with the lake in Virginia.
In October 2023, I even scribbled the words “THRONE LAKE” on a sheet of paper and drew a circle around them to represent the body of water.
I drew a line weaving from the lake and intersecting with two other lines, as if the strands of magic weaving now were threefold not two, and I wrote three words at the center, at the place where all the lines converged: REMEMBER, REMEMBER, REMEMBER.
I wrote them as if I was trying to remember something. Something that despite the water’s return and my body’s healing was still escaping me.
But I couldn’t quite make sense of it. Not yet. Not now.
I slipped the paper into my sketchbook and placed it on a shelf. For months, it would fall out every time I went to draw, and I’d carefully put it back, noting that it always looked the same and nothing had changed — in it or in my understanding.
Then, in December 2023, the throne room where I’d found refuge for years vanished from my mind. Its inhabitants, like my ancestors on the mountain and the fish in the lake, met a grisly fate as the imaginal realm collapsed. Drained of its life-giving energy, dead bodies filled its ethereal chamber as the walls came tumbling down and all that was left was a pitch-black void.
Its emptiness a loneliness I had not known in years.
But then, stars flickered in the void.
A blanket of clouds filled the air, and a castle appeared — if only for a moment — before dissolving back into the void and its infinite expanse of starlight.
It was like the stars themselves were something to be woven, like through their bright light trails, any imaginable thing could be formed.
But for now, it was empty. It was empty.
All part of a healing, a natural process I had yet to understand.
And then, on February 6, 2024, I pulled my sketchbook from its shelf in the closet. I opened to a blank page, and the paper with its trinity of threads came falling out just as it had done for months, but this time, it was different.
It had changed.
Somehow, the words “THRONE LAKE” had been blotted out. It was as if the lake’s miraculous magical mystery water had come to fill the very circle I’d drawn to represent it. For there were no other signs of water anywhere on the page or in the sketchbook or in the closet where it had been stored.
I had no idea where the water came from, but the water appeared, and so it was:
Water magically filled the lake on the page as the moon moved into Capricorn for the first time since the Capricorn new moon on January 11, 2024.
And where was the moon, I wondered, in July 2020 when the literal lake refilled and I learned of its existence and was taken to the throne room in the sky? All of this happened in the thirteen days following a Capricorn full moon eclipse.
And here I am, thinking about it again, writing you this story, as the moon is entering Capricorn yet again.
It’s happening on the evening of Friday, June 21 — the first of two Capricorn full moons to brighten our skies this summer.
What are you remembering?
Reflect back to January 11 through February 8. That was the first ebb of this year’s Capricorn cycle. A cycle that is flowing and flowing now through all of July, returning us, I think, to the fullness of the lake.
The lake after its been cleared and emptied. The lake without throne or castle or whatever preconceived notions you possess. How many things do you believe to be true? And what if you’re wrong — about it all?
This is the water returning now — miraculous, mysterious water — filling the lake of your imagination and gifting you the power to weave and receive in constant flow with all that is — whatever it may be.
On this full moon, the sun is conjunct Midas, Venus, Mercury, and some asteroid called Purple Mountain. (A fact I only learned because I dreamt of the significance of lilac.)
It is all moving in a magical, mysterious way — life.
And try as we may to understand it, to capture it in an idea that makes it all make sense, the more futile our grip becomes. Your power now — the magic now — grows through softening your fingers and letting a mysterious magnetic pulse fill the palms of your hands.
Receive the miracle, humbly become it, and wield it with grace. All the while never forgetting that what’s happening here is far more magical and mysterious than any story that’s ever been told.
☆
To be continued…
LONG STORY SHORT
This full moon time — June 21 to July 4 — marks the first of two Capricorn full moons this summer (the next is July 21). This is a time of great miracles! Of embracing and recommitting to the energetic flow within your being that allows miracles to manifest. For it is true — miracles happen! Countless unimaginable things transpire perhaps simply because someone somewhere was able to imagine them. Or perhaps it’s simply the earth imagining or the light or some unknown thing. I don’t know! That’s the beauty of a miracle: we don’t know how it happens. It simply happens and it’s miraculous! That’s the entire point. The miracle lies in letting yourself not understand, so don’t worry too much about knowing or getting it right. Just wade in the waters of all that truly is without the need to explain it, for this will be your glory.
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