A Mirror Made of Windows: How Philadelphia’s Skyscrapers Helped Me See Myself

(From the series: Pilgrimage to the In-Between: Journeys Through Soul and Soil)

I moved to Philadelphia in 1999 because I didn’t fit anywhere else.

The small towns I grew up in didn’t know what to do with a spirit like mine. I was too much, too expressive, too curious, too different. There was a strictness to those places—a moral rigidity, a religiosity—that left me feeling bad, wrong, ashamed. I never fit in. But in Philadelphia, nothing was too weird, and no one seemed to care if you didn’t fit the mold. There, you could be exactly who you were, or who you were becoming.

But the most unexpected gift the city gave me was not its culture or its camaraderie. It was the skyscrapers.

Before I moved to Philadelphia, I was deeply uncomfortable being alone. Without someone else’s gaze on me, I often felt like I didn’t exist. I didn’t know where I ended and other people began. But the city held me in a way that people couldn’t. The buildings—those tall, mirrored guardians—offered me something I had never experienced: containment.

The skyscrapers became my mountains. My mirrors. My grounding.

There’s a story told by one of my teachers of the Andean mystical tradition, Joan Parisi Wilcox, about a paqo—a shaman from the Q’ero lineage in the Andes—who visited New York City. When he walked through Manhattan, he paused in front of a building and said it was sad. He could feel its spirit. The building, he said, was grieving because no one ever acknowledged it. It had been home to so many people, carried so many stories, and yet no one thanked it. No one saw it.

That story never left me.

Because I saw the skyscrapers. And they saw me.

I’d walk down Walnut Street or Broad or Chestnut, and I’d feel their presence—watching over me, containing me, rooting me to the ground. I’d look up and breathe easier. In those early years of my spiritual awakening, before I had language for what I was feeling, the skyscrapers were my spiritual companions. They reminded me: You’re here. You’re real. You exist.

While others felt energized by nature, I found my peace in glass and steel. While many looked to the trees, I looked up at buildings. The city was my forest, my temple. And those towers were ancient to me in a different way—carriers of memory, vibration, and presence.

Yes, I loved the people and the soul of the city—the constant movement, the cultural richness, the festivals, concerts, and theater. I loved walking alone through the city and never feeling lonely. I loved the sounds outside my window, the way even in chaos there was always life humming.

But it was the skyscrapers that truly held me.

They offered me a reflection when I had none. They gave me edges when I felt formless. They helped me define myself not through others, but through a kind of silent mirroring that asked nothing of me.

Seventeen years I lived there. Weaving grit and street smarts with innocence and naivete. Trying on masks. Expressing every version of myself. And then one day, it was time to unify those parts. To find the self underneath all the selves.

By the end, my sensitivities had sharpened. I began to feel too much—people’s pain, the city’s history, its trauma, its ache. The same buildings that had once held me now echoed with the imprints of a million stories. I needed space. I needed to hear my own voice.

So I moved to the countryside.

Not to reject the city, but to integrate it. To find out who I was without its mirrors. To listen inward. To be reflected by the trees instead of towers. And yet—I still think about those buildings. I still whisper thank you when I visit. Because they were never just architecture. They were witnesses. They were teachers.

And they were the first to show me that I had form. That I was here.

Philadelphia was the place I became.
The countryside was the place I remembered.
And both will forever be sacred ground on my pilgrimage to the in-between.