Sacred Space

Some people fantasize about exotic trips around the world. Others crave fame, or recognition for their work, money, or admiration for their educational and professional accomplishments. Here’s what I fantasize about, right here to your left: sacred space.

The idea of sacred space is as old as man. It’s a concept I’ve seen played out by the Native American’s in beautiful ways. When I was young, we had a friend who was the matriarch of a Northern California Native tribe. Her daughter was the tribal shaman for a period of time. The daughter would go up to a mountain top (a place no non-tribal person could ever go) and she would stay there overnight while her mother kept guard on the ledge below doing ceremony. They knew this space would help accelerate the healing that needed to take place between tribe members and they gave it great respect and reverence.

The desert is also one of these places. Once in Sedona, we had a trail guide take us to sacred sites and perform Native rituals intended to help us see the world in a more connected way. He wrapped a native blanket around us and took us through a guided visualization commonly performed in Native traditions. Just being on the top of a mesa, looking out at the stunning valley of red rock and indigenous plants, with an eagle soaring through the lavender-blue sky, accelerated the experience in a way that couldn’t happen in a Safeway parking lot. The Sacred Space cemented the journey.

A friend and I were recently discussing this idea. She and her dying son had taken a sojourn to sacred spaces all across the country before his death. Each morning over coffee, they would share their dreams. Not long after their journey started, they started having the same dreams, and attributed that to the sacred spaces they slept in.

Sacred Space is palpable. N. Scott Momaday said when you’re in this space, “you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you.” People sense it. They seek it out. They know when they’re in it. And when I’m in it, my creative flow gushes through me in a way it doesn’t show up in other spaces. Building one writing space, for this very reason, is something I crave. (Now, when I write, it’s often on the couch, or at my childhood home where I can get quiet and see the vast green outside, or in some other nomadic location, including my car while waiting to pick up my kids.)

I dream of a place like the one in this picture. A simple place, where I can see out into nature and crack open to that creatively flow. The same space where I can go every day. A place with a desk and a chair and maybe a small bed. I picture Thoreau’s cabin, which we’ve visited on Walden Pond in Boston. (I’ve only recently learned that he and Emerson were friends and Emerson let Thoreau put the cabin on the land as a place to fully commune with nature.) In this phase of my life, I care less about accumulation and more about the simplicity of space, the space that allows me to hear that quiet voice flow through and feeling its breath on my neck.

“If you have been in the vicinity of the sacred – ever brushed against the holy – you retain it more in your bones than in your head; and if you haven’t, no description of the experience will ever be satisfactory.”

― Daniel Taylor, In Search of Sacred Places: Looking for Wisdom on Celtic Holy Islands

Young Stars

Is it just me or are 8th graders getting smarter? They read more, they write deeper, and having sat through a plethora of ceremonies this past week including my youngest son’s, I can tell you they speak like they’ve been attending Toastmasters for years.

I live in a small town where I grew up (then left for 30 years, then came back 4 years ago) and many of these kids are somehow related to people I know. There are really no degrees of separation. This makes watching them grow that much more intriguing.

At my son’s graduation yesterday, and the awards assembly a few days before that, students got up to talk in front of a packed out auditorium. That, in itself, is enough to drive many adults running for the hills. But these students, who’d written their own very impressive speeches, spoke flawlessly. One girl even tripped on her way up the stage, gracefully pulled herself together, and gave a perfect speech. What an example!

Teachers read some of the students poems. They wrote of Paris, and of Audrey Hepburn, topics you don’t anticipate from kids growing up in an unincorporated cowboy town. It made me happy we’d moved back and decided to have our youngest go through this school system. I was blown away by the talent at such young ages. The insight. (Not to get all verklempt, but my baby has actually been published in a national poetry anthology since 6th grade thanks to his teacher who believed in his talent and submitted his poem several years back.)

Call it Indigo-Crystal influence, call it evolution–call it a generation looking to the next with Pollyanna glasses. Whatever label you want to throw, I’m inspired. I’m inspired by their sensitivity, wisdom, and insight. I’m inspired by their creativity, their bravery, and their naivete up against this all-knowing background. By their talent. By their ability to mix enthusiastic youth with the adult sensibilities they need to go through to make these life changes with grace.

It makes me realize my characters in my current YA are not rounded enough to reflect these young adults. I need to honor them more, because from where I observe, they truly are remarkable and they deserve it.

Poets All

This week I met Johnny, a homeless twenty-something. His hair was curly and long, covered by a baseball cap. He wore glasses which struck me as odd, like a sign he hadn’t been homeless very long. The soles of his shoes were wearing thin, and he was unable to find a pair that fit right in the assorted shoes I was helping pass out to the homeless people in a local park. He had hiked a long way to get there.

But that didn’t seem to bother Johnny too much. He was actually more focused on offering his help to us. His friend approached us and asked if someone would pray for Johnny’s protection. Alliances form in the homeless community and apparently Johnny wasn’t in one. Johnny was quick to pipe up, “That’s nice, but there is someone who needs prayer much more than me. She’s dying of cancer. I can’t go see her because I’m on parole and can’t leave the area.”

Johnny’s friend went on to describe Johnny as a poet. Johnny looked down for a moment, then looked up at the sky and waved his hand across. He talked about the canvas of the world and how there was so much material for poetry. It made me think of a movie my husband and I just watched on Netflix called “Before Sunrise” about a young man and woman who meet on a train in Europe, and wind up spending one romantic evening together in Vienna. Unfortunately, both know that this will probably be their only night together. During that night, they run into a homeless man who offers to write them a poem for money. The poem brings out each of their true essences–he’s skeptical the guy just wrote it, she takes it for the beautiful creation it is.

Poetry is everywhere, in castles and in caves. It fills the cracks in between. We can choose to focus on it, or we can ignore it completely.

“In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts.“

~ Carl Honoré

I know I have. Johnny reminded me about that. And I’m going to argue that “doing nothing” is doing something really important.

April is poetry month, or so the Academy of American Poets tells me in my monthly newsletter. It’s a time I always think about poetry in all its shapes and forms. Like Johnny, I feel I am a poet in my core. When I see a duck fly across the sky at dusk, and hear it announce its passing, my mind composes Haiku. When I feel love so deeply I can’t put it into words in just one way, I think sonnet. When I think back about our first meeting, poetry and me, I think of the poem my step-dad had me memorize for money and rehearse at cocktail parties. (Though that in itself was more than obnoxious, the poem has never left me, and that’s a gift.) Here it is–just imagine me at age 7 in my party dress:

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

True, I’m not a man this time around. But I’ll always be a poet, just like you.