It is 10:28 AM TEN YEARS LATER. All human sound hushes as a bell somberly wails in staccato. The next sound we hear? The thunder of Water Fall, roaring, unrelentlessly clearing and cleansing the decade death story of Ground Zero. Did you know the rescuers did not use that name for the downed towers and [...]
The Confluence Project is a 300-mile long public art installation spearheaded by artist/architect Maya Lin and Pacific Northwest tribes. They are joined by artists, architects, landscape designers, and civic groups to explore the crossroads of landscape, cultures, ecology and the region’s history. In seven communities along the Columbia River, the watery border between Oregon and [...]
Most “sacred space” articles I read assume the only sacred place a person would want is serene and quiet. Authors prescribe melodic music, diffuse white light, or rhythmic breathing. I have no quarrel with serene places and recognize that with the hectic pace of Western daily life this surely provides a respite. My point though [...]
The Land is constantly speaking and telling its stories. Land has never stopped. It cannot stop, any more than Earth should stop spinning because we no longer rise in the morning dark and call out to Sunrise. The stories sing on and the teaching rituals canter and we are missing it. (Thankfully modernized humans are [...]
I have been in hibernation. Summer is not the time we think of for going inward, it would seem extending day light, heat, and the propensity for play are the extroverted barricade to prevent such reflection. Maybe my inward journeying is cellular memory of my Finnish bones who still hear the call from 600 years [...]
When I sit with my shrine I am tired: I give myself compassion When I sit with my shrine I long to be outside in the sun: I honor how difficult it is to be in my pain When I sit with my shrine I am filled with gratitude: I marvel how my life is [...]
“You take the insights from these epiphanies and you find something in your daily life that you can hook them onto and you pull the rest of your life along” –Stanley Krippner When I build a shrine I am passionate: I learn to follow my gut When I build a shrine I start in a [...]
The found object for a shrine is like the found poem; it is a vertical moment when Spirit presses the every-day open to reveal the sacred in our midst. Spirit is speaking to us all the time. Sometimes it sounds as Mud on Hands. The Blessing of a Bowl –a found poem in Everyday Sacred [...]
Wild Shrine “One of the main casualties of the recent Western ‘development’ has not just been the ecology in the outer world, but the ecological imagination within.” – Peter Bishop Let me share with you a pet peeve of mine. I truly dislike the term “domestic shrine.” This is a common descriptor for shrines that [...]
Soul — “our deep story” Yoga — “a deep practice” Our spiritual transformations require tending. Soul-Yoga is a practice that kneads our new story of transformation into our new way of being in the world. Shrines are a way to chart ourselves in relation to our ever emerging story of our soul journey. I have [...]
