ESS Island Spiritual Spa and Resort

THE HIGH MEADOW

The Weekend of the Resting Cloud

Friday, August 28 — Sunday, August 30

The gates of ESS Island open this Friday at 7PM. You will be gently escorted through the front gates and received by the island itself — beginning with the most sacred threshold of your stay.

✦ UPON ARRIVAL ✦

THE ENTRANCE RITUAL

🤍 The Selenite Guardian · 7 feet

You step through the front gate and arrive before the 7-foot Selenite Guardian Stone, carved with intricate symbols that seem to soften the mind.

You place your hand on the stone.

In a clean moment, anything that isn't yours to carry releases with ease and grace. Negative overrides dissolve with ease and grace, and the spaces left are filled with God's light. The energetic residue of the week falls away, peacefully, gently…with a single exhale.

✦ · · · ✦

🌸 The Pink Quartz Crystal · 7 feet

Take a moment… and breathe that moment in.

A few steps later, you pass the 7-foot Pink Quartz Crystal.

A field of peace and love surrounds you, quiet, real, unmistakable. Your breath deepens. Your shoulders soften. And the island welcomes you home.

You are safe. You have a welcoming home that fills you with peace, surrounds you with love, and always leaves you with the sense that all is well in your world.

THE ENERGY OF THE WEEKEND · THE MESSAGE OF DIVINE TRANSITION

Transition is the natural course of all things, never to be feared but to be rejoiced. Take heart that transition is a purpose, another step along the journey. It is a step that is surrounded by Love. Let fear fall behind with each step of transition. Promises have been made, and promises made are kept. Trust your journey. Take this message and let it ease your transition.

This message is for all of us experiencing transition and is here to share the message and energy of Divine Transition to ease our individual transitions and the transitions of loved ones.

Transition is the natural course of all things, never to be feared but to be rejoiced. Take heart that transition is a purpose, another step along the journey. It is a step that is surrounded by Love. Let fear fall behind with each step of transition. Promises have been made, and promises made are kept. Trust your journey. Take this message and let it ease your transition.

This message is for all of us experiencing transition and is here to share the message and energy of Divine Transition to ease our individual transitions and the transitions of loved ones.

Transition is the natural course of all things, never to be feared but to be rejoiced. Take heart that transition is a purpose, another step along the journey. It is a step that is surrounded by Love. Let fear fall behind with each step of transition. Promises have been made, and promises made are kept. Trust your journey. Take this message and let it ease your transition.

This message is for all of us experiencing transition and is here to share the message and energy of Divine Transition to ease our individual transitions and the transitions of loved ones.

THIS WEEKEND'S FEATURED EXPERIENCE

THE HIGH MEADOW

Every noon, the island receives a guest who is not you

From the pools, you have seen it on every visit and thought nothing of it: a little after eleven, the high ground above the Listening Terraces puts on a cloud. By two it has taken it off again. You have assumed weather. It is weather. It is also the island's one daily guest — a cloud that comes down to rest on the roof of the house at noon, every noon, and has done so since before the gate stones came ashore.

It does not stop at the gate. It has an arrangement.

This Saturday, you go up to meet it.

At eleven o'clock, you gather on the Listening Terraces, where — for the first time on this island — no one hands you a lantern. It is the middle of the day. You will have to make do with the sun. The high path begins where the terraces end; you have seen its first steps on every visit and never taken them, because from below it appears to lead straight into the sky, which is not where one goes before lunch.

You climb. The steps are cut into the rock, wide and unhurried, and the island drops away a little more with every turn. Then, at a height you will be able to point to afterward and never quite name, the path walks into the white.

Inside the cloud there is no up, no down, and no edge to anything. Light comes from everywhere and lands nowhere. Sound goes soft. The guest ahead of you becomes a grey suggestion, and then not even that. You cannot see the next step. It is there. You cannot see the one after it. It is there too. That is the whole of the instruction for the middle of the climb, and it has always been enough.

And then you are out the top of it. The cloud stops short of the summit — it always has; you could not have known that from below — and the last hundred steps of the island stand clear above the white, in full sun, on a meadow of short grass that has never once been in shade at noon. You come up out of the cloud one by one, like people surfacing, and stand in the light, and look around, and there is nothing to look at. The island is gone. The sea is gone. There is a floor of white to every horizon, the blue straight overhead, and a few dozen people in good shoes, blinking.

At noon — the sun straight up, the one hour when nothing on the island casts a shadow — you go to the meadow's edge and look down into the cloud. Your shadow is there. It is small, and directly beneath you, and it is the only shadow on the island with anywhere to fall. Around its head is a ring of colour.

Yours will wear the ring. Your neighbour's will not — and your neighbour sees it exactly the other way round.

Mountain people and sailors have a name for this. They call it a glory. We have never found a reason to call it anything else. It is only the sun and a few million droplets doing a small sum with light; they do it above every fogged valley and beneath every aeroplane, and did so long before there were valleys with names or anyone to fly over them. The strange part is this: you will look for it around the others, and it is not there. It is only ever around your own. Every guest sees one. No guest can show it to another. Painters have been setting these around heads for a thousand years; it turns out they were working from life.

There is no ceremony for this. Nothing to hold, nothing to say, nothing to put your hand on. You stand in the sun with a ring of light around your shadow, on the roof of the house that welcomed you, and for as long as the sun is overhead you are — there is no plainer word for it — surrounded.

A little after one, the cloud leaves the way it came: not lifting so much as thinning, the way a thought does, and the island comes back beneath you in pieces. The cliffs first. Then the grove, the rings of the labyrinth, the eleven terraces of the south slope, the cove and its boathouse, the pools, the Long Table with lunch already on it, and at last the gate and its two pale stones, small as chess pieces. The whole of it, from above, for the first time — small enough to cover with one hand. And well out to sea, if the light is kind, a ring of seven shadows under the water, keeping their own counsel until the next Great Ebb.

You come down in the sun, and if your shadow runs a step or two behind you for the first few turns, it will have caught up by the terraces. It generally does.

Sunday morning, beside your door: nothing. The island checked. What it showed you on the roof was a ring of light only you could see, and in all its years it has never found a box that fits one. It was never the island's to give. It came in with you through the gate on Friday, and no one — least of all you — could see it until there was a cloud to see it by. It leaves with you the same way. The difference is that now you know.

THE SHAPE OF THE WEEKEND

THE SHAPE OF THE WEEKEND

FRIDAY

7:00 PM — Gates open · The Entrance Ritual

8:00 PM — Dinner at the Long Table

9:30 PM — Sacred Fire Circle · the high path pointed out against the stars; not tonight

SATURDAY

8:00 AM — Breakfast, early · the pools and the quiet paths until late morning

11:00 AM — Assembly on the Listening Terraces · no lantern issued

11:15 AM — The Climb · the high path, and then the white

NOON — The High Meadow · the sun overhead; look down

~1:00 PM — The cloud leaves · the island, whole, from above

2:30 PM — The Late Lunch · the Long Table, in the shade for once

Evening — Yours · supper, the fire, the terraces; the stars require no climbing

SUNDAY

Morning — Unhurried · the spa, the pools, the quiet paths

12:00 PM — Departure · at noon, by arrangement; look up as you pass the gate

The full lineup of spa services is open to you throughout the weekend — the pools, the treatment pavilions, the steam, and every practiced pair of hands on the island. The roof asks only your noon; the rest of your hours are your own, and the afternoon is spent, by long custom, coming down slowly.

The Cartographer's Lantern has known what the island looks like from above since before there was a map of it. It has been waiting, with the patience of brass, for someone to climb up and check its work.

Come up to the roof of the house that welcomed you.

The cloud arrives at noon. It has never once been late.

The lantern stays lit 🕯

AN OPEN INVITATION

SHARE THE ISLAND

If someone you love could use a weekend of this light — a friend, a family member, someone quietly carrying more than they should — we would be honored to meet them. Name your guests below, and each one will receive their own spiritual invitation to ESS Island, with our compliments. Their tickets are on us.

Please invite your guests here:

​https://form.jotform.com/260502480254247​

Be well, sleep well, stay well

-Guidance