Sacred Geography in San Luis Obispo

Chumash Petrogylphs at the top of LaCuesta Ranch. Photo by Steven Marx


This is the text of the story I told at yesterday's new moon ritual at Tridosha.


Long, long ago, before the world was as we know it today, the People knew that the shape of the land around them reflected the Cosmic Order.

In India, Shiva lived at Mount Meru, the axis mundi  that pierced the center of the earth.
Native Americans knew the land held the stories.

Aboriginal peoples everywhere recognize the myths and metaphors that surround them in the form of geography: sacred earth, sacred stories.

When people traveled by foot, and lived in one place for generations, they knew the hills and valleys with their bodies and their souls. They knew where the springs were; they knew the seasons of the tides; they knew the power of the rocks, and they knew the  patterns of the planets.

As time passed, places grew stories, as trees grow fruit, and the stories were passed from one generation to the next. The stories that connected heaven and earth, the ones that resonated in the soul, the live ones, gave meaning to life in ways that we barely remember today. They provided deep connections to our physical environment that opened the heart to a kind of peace that most of us only long for.

Recently, I’ve become more aware of the intertwined geography and history of this place, of the stories this land tells. I’d like to share a couple of those stories, beginning with one about the piece of land below our feet.

The Mission San Luis Obispo de Telosa, the reason this place grew here, sits in the shelter of Cerro San Luis Obispo, on a low mound between two year-round creeks, San Luis Creek and Stenner Creek. The two creeks come closer and closer to each other as they wind toward the sea.

They join here. Well, across the street from here. San Luis Creek meanders in from northeast of town, down the grade near the 101. It goes through Cuesta Park and between Monterey and Marsh Streets, underground for a while, until it emerges near the Mission. Stenner Creek comes down from the northwest, near highway 1. They form a Y behind that new red building, 444 Higuera Street, across from here and a little to the north, just south of the end of Dana Street.

Feng Shui teaches that rivers and creeks are channels for qi; how auspicious then, that this building should sit just at the point where the three channels meet. Tridosha, three channels of subtle energy, reflected by geography! An apt name for this place!

The second story is about two men who had a tremendous impact on the geography of this area, Alex Madonna and Harold Miossi.

Consider the places we associate with them. Mr. Madonna in his pink castle on his scarred mountain, and Mr. Miossi, where? Oh, you don’t know where he lived? You know his name, but you aren’t quite sure who he is?

Listen, and I'll tell you about these two men.

Alex Madonna and Harold Miossi graduated from San Luis High two years apart, Madonna in ‘37, Miossi in ‘39, and they died in the same year, Madonna in April and Miossi in November of last year, 2006. Their grandparents came from the same region in Switzerland, near the Italian border, and their families spoke the same Swiss-Italian dialect at home. Both lost their fathers when they were young.

But their personalities and their lives were as different as the terrain they inhabited.
Alex Madonna, in addition to gaining world renown for building the one and only Madonna Inn and local renown for several environmental disasters, was the owner of the construction company that built the freeway from Buellton to Salinas.

Harold Miossi, as the Tribune’s headline said at the time of his death, is the “Man Who Saved Cuesta’s Hills.” What he saved Cuesta’s hills from was being chopped down and tossed into the Cuesta Valley so that 8 lanes of the freeway could go straight through to Santa Margarita. Local environmentalists remember him; Miossi was a stellar conservationist of the old mold. A leader of the local Sierra Club, he fought valiantly against Diablo, he wrote the master plan that is still keeping Montana de Oro and the Santa Lucia wilderness wild, and much, much more.

Miossi was born, lived, and died in a little house down a dirt drive lined with neatly planted native live oaks that follows a tributary of San Luis Creek. It’s in a canyon off that concrete piece of old highway one near Cuesta Park, the extension of Loomis Street called Miossi Road.

Alex Madonna was warm, generous, and also cantankerous, pig-headed, fiery, and very, very pro-development. The fight against the legacy of his pro-development views is still as dominant in local politics as Cerro San Luis (I will not call it You-Know-Who Mountain) is in our topography.

Harold Miossi was a stubborn man, too, but he was known for his ability to bring people together. The wonderful introduction to the Miossi archives at Cal Poly says his tactics in winning the battle to save the grade could “well serve as a syllabus for coalition-building.” A 1980 article in California Today titled ”How to Beat Mr. Big” reads in part: “When Miossi undertook his fight, it was a lonely one against what seemed great odds. But he had faith in the justice of his stand, and in the democratic process, in his friends and neighbors, and in their good sense and love of the land. If faith can move mountains, it can also sometimes keep them where they are.”

So we have Alex Madonna in his cowboy outfit on the mountain: a masculine symbol on a masculine symbol; and we have Harold Miossi, a gentle soul, living in the valley, doing good works for the city, the county, the state, the people, the land and all those who live on it—living in the valley, a feminine symbol.

Madonna lived as large as a mountain. His obituary was in the New York Times. His funeral procession was led by his riderless horse, his empty boots backwards in the stirrups. A team of horses pulled his casket down Higuera Street. I am so sorry I missed that!

Harold Miossi took care of his mother at home till she died at 97. She was Vera Gnesa Miossi, the same Vera Miossi, who, with her relatives, donated the land at the top of Bishop’s Peak to the city. The plaque on that property reads, “This Peak is given to the People of this community by Lena Negranti, Vera Miossi, Hilda Giacomazzi and Josephine Johnson, in memory of and in tribute to their parents, James and Sofia Giorgi-Gnesa, who in 1870 as youths emigrated from Canton Ticino, Switzerland, settled in this County, raised a family, prospered, and contributed to the betterment of this Community.”

And the legacy of each man to the community? Harold Miossi made provisions for his 1700 acre ranch—all that open land northeast of the city along the freeway before the grade—to be preserved as wilderness in perpetuity.

Southwest of town, Alex Madonna left us the Home Depot and the Dalidio problem.

What can I say?

As above, so below. These men lived out the stories of the land, and the land is living out their stories.

We both create and are created by our environment. The physical world reflects the patterns of the world of ideas, and the world of ideas reflects the physical world. Plato knew it; Pythagoras knew it. Native people worldwide know it.

There is meaning in the landscape. We are not alone in a meaningless universe! We are all connected in ways that we cannot imagine!

What a profound, profound relief.

This is how Black Elk puts it:

"The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers.”

February 18, 2007