the heart as an altar
My dining table is my forever altar; to family dinners, mini breakfasts, reading & highlighting, watercolours, writing & snapping pics.
If an altar is a physical place where the divine and human worlds meet, surely the most sacred part of this coming together is the heart. The heart is what brings this meeting alive, its what gives the physical items meaning.
Our hearts themselves are a kind of living altar, moving life within us, sending sweet signals through the quickening, letting us know heartbreak or delight. There’s a whole language contained in our heart, that words often cant describe.
But.
The Heart, as an Altar. Yes! Have you contemplated this before? Your Heart >> an altar <<.
When I do I feel all my ancestors, my history, my future, my dreams and my heartbreaks, my life so far. Its a gathering of all that is me, that made me to my future that is guiding me forward.
With the fall of formalised religion and many spiritual circles, can we take our inclination to make touch with the sacred and create our own altars, as ways of feeling sacred & divine.
Indeed we can.
Think about how connected and full you feel after spending:
a night under the stars,
a slow walk in nature,
an afternoon in a garden,
an evening listening to live music.
There’s too many examples to list here, but surely we as human’s get to choose the way we touch, or make contact with the sacred, how we connect to a feeling of Oneness✨.
We need feelings of connection & community now, more than ever. We don’t always need someone telling us which way to face, directing a particular set of words, or a set principals.
We know how to touch the divine, we may have lost our way over the years, we may have spent time in formal settings with rigid rules. But as I get older I feel that I don’t need those structures to make contact. I’m grateful for the poet Mary Oliver & John O’Donohue an Irish poet, author and priest, who can guide us gently toward an all accessible divine.
Can you light a candle,
take a flower,
& name it your altar?
Soften your breath,
lean in
& listen.
I think its only right to finish with Praying by Mary Oliver:
It doesnt have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot,or a few
small stones; just pay attention
then patch
a few words together and dont try
to make them elaborate,
this isnt a contest but a doorway
into thanks, and a silence
in which another voice may speak.
