Santa Fe Light

Book excerpt: ART CAPITAL, TOURIST DESTINATION, MODERN ADOBE CITY-SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO, NOW MAY ALSO BE ONE OF AMERICA'S MOST IMPORTANT SACRED SITES. Santa Fe, the City Different, has deeply excited visitors for over a hundred years with its crystal blue skies, Blood of Christ mountains, pure dry air, old adobe charm, and beautiful light. But this high-desert State capital and artists' haven may also be a Land of Light-a premier landscape of multiple sacred sites and heightened spiritual charge. People love this place, they say, for its uplifting, spiritually leavening effect, for how it starts a process of transformation, healing, deep change, and self-reinvention. People revere this place as an axis of creativity, a hotbed of innovation, and a paramount center for recreating culture and spirituality capable of inspiring the world. Santa Fe Light explains why. An able travel guide, it takes you to 111 different locations and their Light temples in and around Santa Fe, numinous places usually only encountered in myths or dreams. And it proposes that the observed social qualities of Santa Fe, its livability, might be due to this fabulous visionary geography alluringly just beyond the veil of our ordinary perception. Richard Leviton, an investigator of visionary terrains for over 25 years, provides firsthand accounts of what it's like inside all these Light temples, what it's possible to see and experience, and how they co-create Santa Fe reality. The total impact of these on awareness and the feeling for life here he calls Santa Fe Light. Touch one Light temple and you open a door into the universe, and you suddenly find immediately practical ways to help the campaign with Gaia to restore the Earth.