Miracle Lake
Miracle Lake
On the magical mystery of Mountain
Lake and the healing power of water
10 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 dust and dirt.
Everything ached. My bones, my joints. Ridges rolled like waves 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 — and by the time I turned twenty-three, 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 the state of Virginia dammed a stream and deposited a city of stone — now called the 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 gleaming 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 a team of geologists and asked what they could do to restore the lake’s water, and in November of that year, the geologists got to work. They started plugging the channels in the basin through which the water was believed to have descended into the earth, but the lake, they soon realized, was not something to fix. Rather, it was something special, the only one of its kind on the planet.
Mountain Lake in Giles County, Virginia, rises and falls in a natural cycle, emptying itself completely every 400 years. This, geologists have determined, is a natural healing process. A way for the lake to remove all the silt it’s accumulated and scrub itself clean. Because of this, they didn’t want to completely impede the channels and destroy the lake’s unique healing cycle. But they did want to expedite the process and 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 my eyes stopped feeling like sandpaper beneath my lids. The ridges on my nails smoothed to form a white translucent surface, and the acid in my stomach stopped rising and scorching my throat every night. But still, some symptoms lingered. Hives appeared like clockwork if I didn’t take a daily antihistamine, 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. They stared at the water, stumped because for some reason, it had 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 continued to shift my perspective. Slowly, carefully, I began observing the parts of my life 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 and the whispers proved helpful — again and again — I started to think something inexplicable and magical was happening.
I’d never been a spiritual person. I’d openly criticized all religious belief for most of my life, yet now…that which I’d previously deemed crazy was starting to make sense to me.
It was as though everything I’d thought was true was being cleansed from my mind — much like accumulated silt — and now, I was seeing life for what it really was: 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 not to some fault or illness but to the basic needs of having a human body.
I felt waves of energy — rising and falling, rising and falling — all around and inside me, and I began to understand the importance of nurturing my potential energy in a culture where my kinetic was valued most. And so, when I needed to rest, I rested. I didn’t judge it. I didn’t push through it. I just let the waves move as they pleased, and when I did, more and more magical events transpired.
And magic — as I came to call it, whatever it was — seemed to depend upon these periods of extended rest.
For if I was go-go-go all the time, the visions stopped. So did the whispers. And, most importantly, I started to feel sick again.
Little red itchy dots — hives — appeared on my hands.
Acid rose from my stomach.
I woke in the morning and cringed as my lids peeled open against dry eyes.
But the moment I minded the ebb and flow of energy inside and all around me, the symptoms retreated. My body stayed healthy, synchronicity swirled, and I felt held, safe, as if floating — face to the sun — atop a magical lake.
Because magic, I realized, cannot flow through a system of pure kinetic energy.
It requires a balance of kinetic and potential — motion and stillness — and between 2012 and 2020, I felt as though I was coming into balance. I felt my power increase. I felt it burning through the palms of my hands, and one day, I sat up from child’s pose on my yoga mat in my kitchen in Queens, and I saw a book on the shelf.
I’d bought it years earlier 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 waves like wind in my ears, and I heard a song in my mind, singing: She’s like the wind. 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 the 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 been slowly returning for years, and that’s when I saw it: how magic was moving through me and all around me, how it ebbed and flowed, and how it had always been a part of me — stored in the physical body of my being.
Eight days later, a message arrived.
It landed in my inbox, sent from a woman who lived over 4,000 miles away, and thanks to this — only this — I learned (for the first time) about a lake in the mountains of Virginia. I sat on my bed in Queens, reading about Mountain Lake and how it had been mostly empty for years, stuck at a stage in a natural healing process and seemingly unable to fill anymore, but now, for some unknown reason, the lake was rapidly filling with water.
A miracle! They called it. The sudden rush of water that appeared in July 2020.
And maybe I wouldn’t have thought anything of it except…the lake just happened to be on the very land where centuries ago, my ancestors lived.
And I thought of the strands of magic, woven like DNA, and I wondered what the lake looked like to them. I wondered if they crossed it as a stream, swam it in the summer, or perhaps, witnessed both its rise and fall.
As I wondered, I heard the song again. It played in my mind — She’s like the wind — and that’s when I learned that in the fall of 1986 — as I was kicking my mother from the inside and eagerly awaiting my escape — the lake was full. The movie Dirty Dancing was filmed in its water, and the song (“She’s Like the Wind”) was recorded for it one month later, the very month that I was born.
I sat in awe, trying to comprehend what it could mean while considering the possibility that of course, it was all just a coincidence. Then, three days later, in the early morning of July 18, 2020, I was unexpectedly awoken from my sleep. A vision filled my mind’s eye, and in it, I traveled to another land, high above my earthly body.
There, I stood in a circle of thrones. Everyone around me radiated love, and I felt completely safe, held, contained. Bounded by the thrones like dirt binds the edges of a lake, and while I still wasn’t sure what it meant, I became increasingly convinced that this was the source of all the magic I’d experienced, and for the next three years of my life, I visited this place often. I closed my eyes and there I went — high above the Earth — to the circle of thrones.
I started calling it “the throne room,” and perhaps because of the timing of its appearance, I associated 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.
Then, I drew a line weaving from the lake. It intersected with another line and another, as if three strands of magic were weaving now, and I wrote three words at the center, at the point where 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 and my many visits to the throne room 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, I closed my eyes and traveled to the throne room again, but this time, something was different. The room had been completely trashed, and its inhabitants, like my ancestors on the mountain and the fish in the lake, had met a grisly end. Their dead bodies filled the ethereal chamber as the walls came tumbling down, the room vanished from my mind, and all that was left was a pitch-black void.
Its emptiness a loneliness I had not known in years.
I cried and cried.
Weeks passed.
And then, stars flickered in the black.
A blanket of clouds filled the air, and a castle appeared — if only for a moment — before dissolving back to black and returning to where they came from — that infinite expanse of starlight.
As I watched the objects come and go, I couldn’t help but think that the stars themselves were something to be woven, that through their bright light trails, any imaginable thing could be formed, and I thought of the strands of DNA that wove to form my body. I thought of how they too came from the stars, and I saw clearly how I have been woven just as you have been woven and just as all things have been woven — to ebb and flow and come and go.
All part of a cleansing, a healing, a natural process I had yet to understand.
Then, two months later, I pulled out 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 though the lake’s miraculous magical mystery water had come to fill the very circle I’d drawn to represent it. But there were no other signs of water. The rest of the page was devoid of spots. The sketchbook and its other pages were completely dry. I pulled out the other books on the shelves. I touched the floor of the closet and its walls, seeking something damp, but there was no other sign of water anywhere. Yet, water was there, held inside the circle on the page, bound inside the perimeter of what was once Throne Lake.
The water cleared it from the page just as it had cleared it from my mind, and to this day, I have no idea where the water came from, but I know: it appeared. It seemed to flow through invisible channels beneath the surface of everything. As if all the world were like the lake in Virginia, and magic moved through holes in two directions: resting and moving, rising and falling. It came and went. It came and went. It marked the page and blotted the ink, and called to me to REMEMBER REMEMBER REMEMBER:
Magic is real, and any imaginable thing can be formed.
