Monday, August 28, 2006

A Visit to Lily Dale

One of the day trips we took out of Buffalo, NY was about an hour away to Lilydale. A community of Spiritualists. My in-laws have been many times and came with us to show us around. It was very peaceful, except for the gaggle of Red Hat ladies!

I'll call this picture "Lines of communication are open in Lilydale, NY."

Beautiful plantings of lilies as you would expect in a place named after the flower.

Of course, you could buy a lily plant to take home with you. This gazebo smelled heavenly (if you like the scent of lilies that is).

All the lilies lined up, I wished I could have bought some, but didn't think they'd like the flight back to California. You can see some of the nice little homes in this community. They were pretty reasonably priced according to the couple of "For Sale" signs we saw. One of the rules to live in this community you have to be a member of the Spiritualist assembly that is there.

Thought I'd try some closeup lily pics. I was pretty pleased with how these came out.

I like the shadows in this picture. The color seems unnatural and the overly shiny petals make them look fake sometimes!

A visitor to the all red lily.

Isn't this a nice view? So quiet and peaceful here.

I loved the mature trees, especially this willow.

Another view of the lake.

A submerged walkway. If it was hot, you could walk right off into the lake to cool off.

A closeup of the willow, a very welcoming tree. I gave it a hug and it hugged me back.

What does this say to you? I saw eyes, definitely eyes!

The Forest Temple, where #1 son and I were both selected out of the audience for "readings" by the several Spiritualist readers. Very interesting and entertaining. It seemed that my paternal grandfather and his sister came through, my great aunt to me, and Zach's great grandfather to him. I believed it a little more readily than he did. I found the whole experience to be a bit dissonant, as there is definitely a strong belief held by the readers and healers which I absolutely can understand and support, but this is juxtaposed with the showmanship that they need to use to keep the crowd entertained. I think maybe a private reading would be a lot different.
Anyways, we throughly enjoyed ourselves in Lilydale, a very peaceful place with good food and ice cream, and a lake to swim in.

4 comments:

Kristen said...

oh how peaceful and lovely it all looks. thanks for having the link for spiritualism. i didn't realize that's what it was. very interesting. the pictures are lovely - my favorite is the red lily with the spider in it. cool!

Jaye said...

There is a GREAT To the Best of Our Knowledge compilation on Audible.com called Amazing Grace. It includes an entire section on Lilydale, but includes other spiritual stuff as well. Highly recommended.

Jaye said...

OH! And the lilies would make fantastic quilts or quilt-lets.

Laume said...

I'm on a e-list with some folks that regularly go to Lilydale. Interesting to see and read about it in your blog. I get what you mean about being sort of torn between believing and the whole showmanship side of it. I have no doubt that that we can communicate "across the veil" but I still approach any specific show of this sort of talent with a huge dose of healthy skepticism.