Living The Labyrinth Series
Part Two
By Mary DeDanan
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Amongst my spiritually minded friends I am known as an altar-builder extraordinaire.
I've built altars for years, both large public altars at community gatherings and
small home altars: wondrous places of impermanent beauty. It's fun to build altars,
a source of pride and delight. Sacred interior decorating. A way to honor what is
truly important. So why is it that all of a sudden I can't seem to build a single
one of the damned things? For the first time in years, I am altarless. I have rational
answers, but I don't like them much. I have irrational answers, and I like them less.
Here's the rational: Disruption is everywhere. I've moved into a new, temporary place,
an old cottage getting a slow remodel, tucked into a ramshackle forest clearing.
It's small, dark, unfinished, not even a kitchen yet. Boxes piled, I'm slowly unpacking;
half my things have gone into storage. Many plants and all my labyrinth rocks remain
at the old house, unable to fit in the moving truck. It feels like a refuge for a
foreigner: me. It is not home. There's still grief over leaving my old home by the
sea, and my attempt to make an intentional community there. Related legal issues,
serious money issues, anger. Struggling to build my future, permanent home: a yurt.
Looking for new work. Lots and lots of disruption. I've been too tired even to dream
at night.
Here's the irrational: I've lost faith. Not all, but a good chunk of it. It should
not have turned out like this. Divine Being by Whatever Name You Like Today, I thought
we had a deal here. I was building my True Home: my ocean community. It was going
to work out -- I was so sure of it, felt reassured of it. And instead it was a miserable,
expensive failure which was not my fault, and was all my fault. The true power to
reckon with in this universe is Chaos, and that's not what an altar-maker, a practitioner
of prayer, wants to discover. I've lost what I came here for. I don't understand.
Thus a month after the move, my altar items -- the candles, and photos of ancestors,
and Goddess statuettes, and feathers, and stones, and shells, and runes, and tarot
cards, and bright silk cloths, and scraps of beauty -- all the Stuff of sacredness,
stuff I've played with and collected and rearranged for years -- are now the only
things neither unpacked nor stored, but instead are tucked into boxes, which are
stacked in the hall. Waiting.
***
One morning, over breakfast and my to-do list, it strikes me quite clearly: I will
wait no longer. I want my life back.
I want my garden, my books, my poetry, my meditation, my work, my walks, my labyrinth,
my stars in the night sky, my music-making, my dreams, and oh yes, I want back my
faith. And the key to all this is somehow altars. I must build them everywhere. "Unpack
last boxes," I write on my over-packed list. Then I sip tea and stare out of
the still-unfamiliar window, at the close redwoods and pines where I live now. Then
I take a first step. I write a poem, the first one in over two months. It's not much
of a poem. But it is a reclaiming.
***
In the language of symbols, I have lit a candle and placed it on a small, battered,
antique dresser near my bed. The room is tiny and the corner quite dark, even in
daytime. But the candle brings the spark of life. A few other objects have been unearthed
from the boxes and set down. A copper bowl. A clay Bird Goddess, a reproduction whose
original is 7000 years old. An old Indian basket shaped like a yoni. I place a flower
in a glass. As simple an altar as I've ever made. In the language of symbols, it
speaks to me.
The land owner, a kind but over-committed woman, finally puts in a kitchen. The new
sink leaks, but I'm so pleased to no longer be washing dishes and vegetables in the
bathroom that I don't care. I pack away the hot plate I used for weeks. On the wall
over the cups, I hang my corn dolly, a representation of the ancient Celtic Goddess
Brigid. The word "corn" in the old world meant simply "grain,"
not the maize we think of. So Brigid is made of the grain of my ancestors, of wheat.
Her head and outstretched arms are sheaths of wheat; she wears white lace which was
once part of an old tablecloth, and this dress is bound with yellow ribbons which
hang down like rays of sunlight. I've sewn crystals to her shoulders, and figured-brass
buttons to her hands and yoni. Under her I've put a small bowl of roses. Down and
to the side hangs a long, thin, handmade broom. Symbols that honor the hearth, and
the abundant Mother.
I put a postcard picture of a Butterfly Goddess over my desk. Next to it is a small
pewter container. A little frog sits on top of the cover, which is sculpted like
a lily pad. I found it at a stranger's estate sale. A gay man had died, and his executor
was busy and cheerful, a big, gossipy, bearded guy with a bad limp. The pewter frog
caught my eye, and the executor explained that the container once held the ashes
of the dead man's lover, who died the year before him. "Yech!" said this
young woman nearby. I looked at her in surprise. "That makes it a sacred object,"
I said. I don't think she heard. But the executor did. Quietly, he put it in my hand.
"Free," he said. It sits on the windowsill now, in my home office. The
images of frog and butterflies mingle, next to the clock, as it happens. They remind
me. Once butterflies were thought to be the souls of the dead. Once this frog guarded
a man's remains. The time to live fully is now. I rummage around, finding the photos
of my own beloved dead, my brothers and father, a lover. My ancestors whom I never
knew, but whose DNA I carry. I light a candle for them all.
My little dining table looks bare, although it's crowded with two green placemats,
books, note paper, car keys, salt and pepper, and always, it seems, crumbs. What
it needs, of course, is a touch of sacredness. A bunch of dark red sweetpeas comes
from a friend's garden that I'm tending while she's in Europe. They sit in a wineglass
on the table, fragrant and brilliant. Somewhere I had candleholders, where...? Ah.
Now. An altar for the mundane, sensuous joy of eating.
On the dresser, by the one and only closet in this place, I've put a statue of Aphrodite.
I've dressed her in necklaces, as her people did in ancient days, of turquoise and
tumbled crystal. A fresh flower at her feet. Here I've hung my mirror for dressing,
and my jewelry. When I choose my clothes and style myself, I look at her naked white
plaster, with pleasingly big hips and soft tummy. An altar for the body.
Throughout the house, the flowers die, the candles burn down. I replace them, light
them, refresh them. Altars must be tended.
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An altar is a focus point. A concentration of energies. A place of connection to
what is felt but not always seen. An evocation of memory. An invocation of prayer.
An honoring of what is personally holy. A liminal space. This last quality is my
favorite. Liminal: subtly there, barely perceptible. Like dreams. Betwixt and between,
a gateway to otherness.
***
I go to visit my favorite cove, the one I used to live above. Waves roll in softly
this afternoon, crashing in rhythmic music. Water crashes around my legs, shockingly
cold. Pebbles shush. I pick up polished stones of green and blue jade, the color
of the water in sunlight. I see a sleek brown head out in the kelp bed -- a curious
seal who watches me. The occasional seagull squawks, the occasional tourist laughs,
an osprey glides over the cliffs. I sit on the rocks at low tide, more content than
I have been in a long time. There are a hundred things I should be doing instead,
but I am here, in this place at the edge of the world, where water and land meet,
betwixt and between. The waves focus my eye, my energy, my yearning. I arrange pebbles
and driftwood, pieces of shell and red seaweed, into a pattern and a prayer. I chant
my song to the Ocean Goddess, and listen to hers.
This place too is an altar.
I keep a small, smooth stone in my pocket, and hold it when I have gone back to the
cottage. It is an anchor to ocean and earth, and hope. It is a talisman of desire.
***
It is the Pagan holiday of Lammas, or Lughnasadh as it was called in the old times
(pronounced "lu-na-sa"). August 1, the festival of first harvest. For couple
thousand years in Celtic Europe, it was the time of great fairs, where folks came
together to play and celebrate the crops, race their horses and contest their skills
with games, make contracts and deals, and most definitely to flirt, entering into
trial marriages. That marriage wasn't considered legally binding until a couple had
passed the winter together -- our ancestors are wiser than we think.
As modern Pagans, we hold a playful, and by comparison rather tame, evening ritual,
focusing on our connection to the Earth. This year, at the last minute, an altar-builder
was needed, and I said I'd do it. I volunteered my friend Susan as well. Much of
my stuff is in storage still, and she was busy up to the last minute with work and
a niece's wedding. So what we managed to build in less than an hour in the front
of our ritual space was very simple, and that's all it needed to be. A large green
velvet cloth laid down on a low stage. In back, a big piece of twisted driftwood,
wrapped with white Christmas-tree lights. A horn-shaped basket filled with apples.
Flowers. Candles. Just the basics. In our announcements of the event, we asked people
to bring a "small symbol of your personal harvest, from your garden or from
your heart" (I make the flyers, so they get to be just a touch poetic). As the
space filled up with people, so the altar filled up with wonderful things.
Bundles of fragrant fresh herbs tied with ribbons. Just-picked tomatoes and apricots
and zucchini. Baby booties. Bracelets and rings. A letter someone wrote to her grandmother,
who recently died. Polished stones, feathers, flowers. More candles. More flowers.
Overflowing the green velvet, spilling out the sides and down the steps. Vegetables
and fruits. Carved objects, a Buddha, Goddesses, Gods. Antlers. Tools. Bones. Beautiful,
meaningful, sacred Stuff, which marked our coming together as a community and celebrating
the holy day of the Earth. And at the very end, people took it all away again.
It's not the collection of Stuff. An altar is defined by the intent and feeling that
goes into its making, and its keeping. Sometimes that making is purposeful, sometimes
organic, sometimes improvisational, sometimes healing. Chaos has a hand, to be sure.
The only required ingredients are from the heart.
Visit Earth Prayers, poems and photos
also by Mary DeDanan
And also visit Living The Labyrinth, Part One