Sacred Places, inside + out.
"...a sacred object is one that has absorbed the attention of the soul" Thomas Moore
The altar, the sacred space has many connections to the found objects or the remnants from our walks.
Remnants are traces, interventions, while the altar, the sacred space is a holding place. Walking is to move through, to find, to welcome and be welcomed; sitting is finding a place to be, to arrive, to be still. One is receptive mobility, the other - receptive stillness.
Walking produces the remnants, picked up, carried, or left. We move through the world and objects deposit themselves into our attention: whether an insect, an animal, a feather, a leaf and on... They are traces the world leaves for us and in us, objects we gather from a meeting, an encounter.
Sitting produces the sacred space. The place we make, arrange and tend. Our intervention into the field of the world: here, this matters, this is held, this is important. The altar positions itself as the place where the walk can come to rest. The surface for found objects.
Remnants are traces, interventions, while the altar, the sacred space is a holding place. Walking is to move through, to find, to welcome and be welcomed; sitting is finding a place to be, to arrive, to be still. One is receptive mobility, the other - receptive stillness.
Walking produces the remnants, picked up, carried, or left. We move through the world and objects deposit themselves into our attention: whether an insect, an animal, a feather, a leaf and on... They are traces the world leaves for us and in us, objects we gather from a meeting, an encounter.
Sitting produces the sacred space. The place we make, arrange and tend. Our intervention into the field of the world: here, this matters, this is held, this is important. The altar positions itself as the place where the walk can come to rest. The surface for found objects.
"There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places." Wendell Berry
In The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, Thomas Moore writes about the home altar as a place that "holds the overflow of the soul." The objects we gather there aren't decorative but are images the psyche has reached for, objects to pay attention to, or gifts to see daily. He's drawing on James Hillman's archetypal psychology: the altar as a place where inner figures find outer form.
As we make our altars we are doing soul work. The kitchen windowsill with three shells and a candle is soul-work. It is attention.
The altar also holds the dead and the living in the same visual field, a shrine. The photograph beside the stone feather or leaf becomes a small cosmology, a constellation.
The altar isn't fixed but seasonal, cumulative. It changes as walking bring new remnants, new traces, new thoughts and feelings, new constellations as things are released or buried or given back. The altar as a living archive: animated, reciprocal, always in motion.
As we make our altars we are doing soul work. The kitchen windowsill with three shells and a candle is soul-work. It is attention.
The altar also holds the dead and the living in the same visual field, a shrine. The photograph beside the stone feather or leaf becomes a small cosmology, a constellation.
The altar isn't fixed but seasonal, cumulative. It changes as walking bring new remnants, new traces, new thoughts and feelings, new constellations as things are released or buried or given back. The altar as a living archive: animated, reciprocal, always in motion.
And then there are "wild sanctuaries," sacred places marked by a feeling of being recognised by the landscape. A place to rest to meet the smallest of critters, the leaves, plants or the copse, the land, the herd of muntjac deer... or the sky.