Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Holy and Perishable

For over six years, my altar's been falling apart.

It was a ruin when I first adopted it--a 60's-style backyard brick hearth, long disused, cracks already opening in the mortar. I swept it clean and filled it with votive candles and incense the night of Summer Solstice. My neighbours have year after year remained quietly tolerant that every morning I ring a bell and kneel in front of an eyesore fifteen feet from their kitchen window.
Every summer, I've removed objects and added others, as I do to the indoor altar that becomes the focus of my practice September through May. This year, I've included no Christian symbolism, though every day I begin by crossing myself and reciting the formulas traditional to the monastic morning prayer of Lauds. Red, white, yellow, and black stones for the four directions surround a small Shiva Lingam. Behind that sits a small, corroded bronze Indonesian Buddha, missing an arm and part of its chest--a reminder of the transience of all things, including our understanding of the Friend who makes our lives possible and gives them meaning.
Tibetan Buddhist monks proclaim this lesson of transience by spending weeks constructing mandalas of coloured sand--which they then sweep back into chaos and pour into moving water.
The collapse of my repurposed shrine continues. Yesterday morning as I knelt,  a cluster of bricks had skewed loose from the wall, wobbling under my touch. They're going nowhere for the moment, but the frosts and thaws of the coming winter will take their toll. The floor of the main chamber is already one course shorter than when I first consecrated it. The lower chamber, once the firepit, holds a compost of undisturbed garden detritus dedicated to the Goddess's endless cycle of generation, decay, and rebirth. Eventually, everything above that I've prayed over and venerated will collapse into it.
When it does, I will take it as an invitation to give thanks for the lesson and to look for the Sacred in another corner of the garden.

1 comment:

  1. A beautiful meditation on transience. We could not know the Friend whom we approach at the altar were it not that the Friend outlasts the altars we erect, could we? You inspire me to revisit the objects I have on my own altar. And more than that, the idols --forgive the loaded term--I cling to in my ego, symbols that somehow want to supplant the Friend's Presence until the Presence is absence indeed.

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