Harbin hot springs | Into the Mythica

Harbin Hot Springs was a clothing-optional retreat center and intentional community located in Lake County, California, in the mountains north of the Napa Valley, that served for decades as one of the primary gathering places for the alternative spiritual and healing communities of the American West Coast. Fed by natural hot springs regarded as sacred and healing since the time of the Indigenous peoples of the region, Harbin offered its visitors immersion in thermal waters, meditation, bodywork, and communal living within a container of radical acceptance and openness. For many who passed through it, Harbin represented an encounter with the possibility of a genuinely different way of being in the world — a living demonstration, however imperfect, of what community built around healing and consciousness rather than commerce might feel like.

In the history of the Mythica's Quest, Harbin Hot Springs appears as a significant coordinate on the rainbow road of the American spiritual underground — one of the nodes of the alternative world where significant encounters, teachings, and initiatory experiences occurred for many of the characters who move through the Mythica's Great Story. The hot springs themselves, as a place where the healing properties of the earth and water elements are made directly accessible through immersion in geothermally heated waters, represent a particularly concentrated expression of the genius loci of the land: the intelligence of the earth offering its healing to those who come with openness and genuine regard. The land here was sacred long before any of us arrived. It will be sacred long after.

Harbin Hot Springs was largely destroyed by the Valley Fire in September 2015, one of the most destructive wildfires in California history to that date. The loss of Harbin was mourned by the many thousands of people for whom it had been a place of healing, community, and genuine encounter with an alternative vision of human possibility. In the Mythica's cosmological understanding, the destruction of Harbin — and the ongoing efforts to rebuild it — belongs to the larger pattern of the Age of Shadow: the forces of incoherence and environmental crisis that are part of what the Great Story of the current age must move through on the path toward the Garden of Gaia. The fire took the structures. It could not take what the land holds.