There are probably hundreds of places with names like this, maybe thousands. Craggy views of mountain ranges, waterfalls, oceans, mesas. Anywhere that lends to some sort of expanded
consciousness, I suppose.
This is in New York's Adirondack Mountains, and although it has been years since I last sat there, I can close my eyes and still feel it. It is north, so far north that from a nearby mountain I can clearly see Canada, Vermont, and off in the distance the beginnings of New Hampshire.
But this Inspiration Point is not a lofty mountain perch. The last glaciers must have carved it out around 10,000 years ago, a deep, cold lake, water stained black by the hemlocks that grow on its shores. The ancient sheet of ice must have known that this was nearly as far as it would plow south, and before the mile-thick blanket melted into the moraines and drumlins at Syracuse it dropped much of its heaviest stones here.
Boulders, the size of cars, of trucks. Boulders the size of three-story houses strewn everywhere and this one boulder, flat like the skipping stone of a young Apollo, came to rest on the shores of a new-born lake.
A giant slab, twenty feet wide, more than fifty long, jutting out into the lake. And ten thousand years later I am sitting out at its farthest point, attracted by a name on a map.
Sure it was beautiful, loons and bullfrogs, osprey, even a bald eagle and a beaver, and the sun falling behind me. But I wasn't so inspired.
Nightfall and I have made camp at the shore. Moonrise. Moonset, and I take one last walk to the edge of this ancient rock.
The sky above is clear and the waters below still. The horzon distant and thin, a barely discernible smudge.The magic happens. Here I find myself suspended in stars, seamless in that vanishing horizon and their reflection in the dark waters. Stars above and so perfect their reflection below, that I could barely tell the difference, totally enveloped in starshine and black velour sky. So dizzying I had to sit and feel my connection to the rock and that vague sense of the earth's spinning.
I sat there caressed by starlight and remembered an old scout saying: For this place your heart shall yearn, and for this place your soul shall burn, and to this place you must return.
But I haven't been back, except in my heart and soul, and six year later in this, my first real attempt at a node, and lengthy at that. The end.