Ellen Simmons " The Clearing in the Woods"

In Lane's book Landscapes of the Sacred he speaks of four axioms.

1. Sacred place is not chosen, it chooses.
2. Sacred place is ordinary place, ritually made extraordinary.
3. Sacred place can be tred upon without being entered.
4. The impulse of sacred place is both centripetal and centrifugal, local and universal.

Lane describes in his book that he was walking one day on a trail he knew very well. He began to head back home when he saw a less-traveled path in the opposite direction. He saw a fallen tree and beyond that he saw a clearing covered with leaves. He described the clearing as "dimly lit and inviting. There was nothing numinous about the place; I had been there before." So, he stood at the clearing and waited. After a few moments he noticed a shuffle in the woods and he wasn't sure what the sounds were. Then he saw a young doe in front of him. Once the deer saw him she hid but then came back out to meet eyes with him. And he waited until she disappeared. "A simple, utterly peaceful and mysterious meeting it had been. The uncanny thing was that I had been invited to this place, I had felt the deer (I felt some presence) in the clearing a good ten or fifteen minutes before she came," this was Lane's reaction to the deer. He said that the deer was a gift for searching the whole day for mana, for mystic voices, a luminous encounter with the Other...

Lane relates this story about the clearing in the woods to the four axioms, or four different rules which are able to guide the student of American spirituality in finding the understanding in the character of sacred space. Lane says that the axioms are "principles that underlie the way by which landscape is molded in the religious imagination."

I feel that the story relates best to the first and third axiom. It relates to the first axiom because the first says "Sacred place is not chosen, it chooses," and Lane feels that he was chosen to be in the clearing at that very moment to witness his "gift". It relates to the third axiom because it states "Sacred place can be tred upon without being entered" and Lane said that he had been to that clearing before and did not witness what he witnessed on that particular day. He had previously tred upon those grounds before without entering the sacred place.