The other day, Michelle Mayama stood in the Lake Harriet Spiritual Center, an unassuming church at Forty-Fourth and Upton in Linden Hills. She held a chain, at the bottom of which hung a smooth piece of amethyst. As she entered the main glass-domed sanctuary, the stone spun almost too quickly to see—at about six hundred rpm. “I’ve broken a pendulum here before,” she explained. “It just flew off.” But, she explained, that was during a particularly strong surge of energy. On most days, things are pretty quiet here as vortexes go.
With shortly cropped silver hair, a calming manner, and berobed in loose cloth, Mayama described herself as a “midwife of consciousness” who delivers people into broader self-awareness. Then she described the “ley lines” that serve as a sort of circulatory system for the Earth. She walked around the space, and her pendulum jigged as she moved through the three energy meridians that converge here.
The vortex has always been here, Mayama said, but its pulse had grown faint when, on September 17, 1992, under an overcast but otherwise calm sky, with no sign of rain, witnesses reported seeing a bolt of lightning travel up Sheridan Avenue. It struck the dome of the church and scorched the interior of the sanctuary. The strike happened around the time of Hurricane Andrew, and Mayama believes that both events happened as the earth realigned and reactivated old vortexes. The resulting fireball inside the sanctuary got the vortex flowing again, rather like Mother Nature using a Bioré strip to unclog a pore.
Early in the 1900s, an Englishman named Alfred Watkins began to chart the physical features that lined up in interesting ways across the emerald isles of Britannia: church spires and standing stones, barrows and river fords. Watkins was a habitual countryside walker, complete with anorak and walking stick, and, while tramping across the heaths of England, he realized the Saxons had dotted the land with markers that could be sighted from a distance. Over time, these points inevitably became gathering places where cathedrals and public houses arose; they became imbued with the psychic residue of all that passed through.
Watkins thought it took a special person to dowse such lines. In the little treatise he published on the subject in 1922, Early British Trackways, Watkins mused, “Such work required skilled men, carefully trained. Men of knowledge they would be, and therefore men of power over the common people. And now comes surmise. Did they make their craft a mystery to others as ages rolled by. Were they a learned and priestly class, not admitted until completing a long training—as Caesar describes the Druids. Or did they—as Diodorus and Strabo say of Druids—become also bards and soothsayers. Did they, as the ley decayed, degenerate into the witches of the middle ages.” It begs the question: Which came first, the human or the ley? Watkins suggested that underneath the track lays a force that only a spiritually inclined person could harness in plotting the way from Point A to Point B.
Mayama would agree. “The Native Americans knew about vortexes, for sure,” she told me. We left the church and walked down to Beard’s Plaisance, the lakeside park one block south. Here a ley line shooting southeast, out of the corner of the sanctuary, intersects with another that runs roughly due east, out across Lake Harriet. Their intersection forms a much larger vortex, and Mayama’s pendulum once again pulled on her wrist like a poodle on a leash. This particular knoll has been an important site for centuries—legend has it that an American Indian chief placed a curse on the Europeans from this spot, harnessing the power of the vortexes. While we looked around, a father and son volleyed a ball back and forth on the tennis court.
This particular vortex spins counterclockwise, Mayama said; behind us, another up the hill swirls the opposite way. Standing in a vortex is like standing in a hot tub for your mind; meditating in a clockwise vortex can help actualize what you dream for—a career change, a relationship, inspiration—while the counterclockwise vortex helps the body release what it’s been holding on to. Even if I hadn’t had my own pendulum, which was spinning rather limply in my hand, it was a spot I’d be drawn to.
Mayama pointed out signs of the vortex’s effect on local flora—elms splitting at their bases, trunks skewed at odd angles. Around us, several large trees twisted in their trunks. Their arms flowed counterclockwise, like a frozen whirlpool. It was a peaceful spot, a nice place for a picnic. But you wouldn’t want to set up permanent residence. The constant flow of energy stresses the body, Mayama explained, “Like building a house in the middle of a river.”—Jason Weidemann
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