I believe in the immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings. I believe that the state we enter after death is wrought of our own motives, thoughts, and deeds. I believe that in the life to come I shall have the sense I have not had here, and that my home there will be beautiful with color, music, speech of flowers and faces I love.
Without this faith there would be little meaning in my life. I should be "a mere pillar of darkness in the dark." Observers in the full enjoyment of their bodily senses pity me, but it is because they do not see the golden chamber in my life where I dwell delighted; for, dark as my path may seem to them, I carry a magic light in my heart. Faith, the spiritual strong searchlight, illumines the way, and although sinister doubts lurk in the shadow, I walk unafraid towards the Enchanted Wood where the foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, and where life and death are one ...
-  Hellen Keller, Midstream, My Later Life

Journal Note:

To create within
One’s life, one’s self
A golden chamber of quiet
Of rest, of love
To retreat into
A place to rebuild one’s reservoir.
A quiet place to nurture one’s spirit
Where you encounter the magic light of your heart
So that you have something to offer the world.

Joseph Campbell called that place of quiet rejuvenation your Grail Castle.

Your Sacred Place
Your sacred place is
where you can find yourself
again and again.

You don’t really have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that’s not a Waste Land; some field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia — a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you — a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there. The joy is there.
A sacred place is hermetically sealed off from the temporal world. When you’re in such a space, there is no penetration through the enclosure. You are in an eternal zone that is protected from the impact of the stimuli of the day and the hour.
The Grail Castle — for that’s what this sacred space is — is the place where your associations are not with the field of phenomenal experience, but with the field of your own inward life. To visit the Grail Castle is to have found your sacred space. Then, once you have found the connection in your sacred space, you can perhaps translate it into other parts of your life. But first you have to have a little oil well that goes down deep.
– from Reflections On The Art Of Living, A Joseph Campbell Companion. Selected and Edited by Diane K. Osbon