Little Altars Everywhere

A bit of broken branch I found on my walk - it looked all the world like a small black and brown bird.

I had a day off in Washington DC and decided to visit the National Gallery of Art. I was delighted to discover the museum was featuring a retrospective of the works of the sculptor Henry Moore. I love Moore’s work and spent all afternoon wandering through rooms of his paintings, drawings and of course beautiful sculptures. One of the exhibits that stayed with me was a room set up with the items Henry Moore had lying around in his studio for inspiration. These were the things he’d placed randomly (or not randomly) on shelves, tables, on his desk and all around his works space. There were many small natural items— stones and feathers, bones, leaves, photos, scraps of paper, postcards, sketches, sticks and driftwood. Obviously many of the items were things he’d found, kept or picked up while wandering around outside. These were apparently images, shapes and textures that were pleasing or interesting to him. Moore’s monumental sculptures were semi-abstract, sometimes fashioned in bronze or directly-carved from stone or wood, the shapes he often used were reminiscent of the bits and pieces of the natural world he like to keep around him. He was fascinated with certain kinds of lines, shapes and forms (particularly in the natural world) and that fascination and appreciation found its way into his art, his life and his expressions of beauty. The museum’s display of these items were reverently and carefully placed and had the feeling of being an altar of some kind, a deep bow to the spirit of the work and man.

I have to admit I was touched to see all those bits of the natural world in the exhibit, partly because I loved seeing how all those natural curves and shapes appeared and repeated in his artwork, and partly because I also have a house full of odd bits of here and there I’ve brought home in backpacks, coats pockets, jean and jacket pockets. Really, all over my home and office are little altars of things collected on my wanderings (here at home and out and about). Some of these collections look like altars (a table with a prayer wheel from Old Delhi, a stone from a high peak in Peru, a St Francis prayer card, incense from an Italian monastery, a carved Zuni image of Corn Woman which was gift on a significant birthday, a small Buddha, a ceramic Ganesha made by a child and given to me in Mumbai, a small stick from the hill where it is believed the Beatitudes were spoken, a fabric heart made at a Buddhist monastery in California, a pottery shard, a piece of amethyst, a pine cone from a 300 year old tree that J.R.R. Tolkien was said to have sat beneath, imagine and write. There are also other kinds of altars in my home that are made of stones in a bowl, a piece of broken wood in the shape of a bird, more birds, everywhere bird shapes, fossils and geodes and always stacks of poetry books within easy reach wherever you sit. For years I have taken a small bag of these kinds of items with me as I travel and set them on bedside tables all over the world. Always stay grounded to what matters most, always bring an altar that reminds, remembers and spools out the threads that connect me home.

When I looked up the definition of an altar in the Webster’s dictionary it seemed very narrow to me, focusing on a raised flat table and an act of some kind of ritual sacrifice. It doesn’t really describe the essence of an altar for me. Altars are places to honor connection to a thread that moves through the world and through ourselves. They are places for remembrance or centering some kind of personal or community ritual. An altar is a place for symbols of things that matter to us, inspire us, or a reminder of our own growth and transformation. They are containers for our joy and delight and celebration. There are altars no one expected or wanted to make as a place to contain unspeakable loss or grief. An altar can be a collection of items, like Henry Moore’s stones and bones, that mysteriously calls to something deep and personal within us —fascinating us with its shape, texture, form or inner spirit.

So like Henry, I keep building altars to something transcendent and good in this world with physical objects, with stones and feathers and symbols of what matters. But I also build altars with my actions, with the good intentions I carry on my walk in this world. I build altars of delight, of creative fascination and wonder. I build altars of remembrance, altars to the inspiration of others, the lives and stories that continue to lift me up. I build altars to acknowledge who I’ve been, who I am now, and who I am still becoming. Altars made of stories and songs, poems and paintings. I build altars I guess because I can’t help but pick up another smooth stone on the banks of Lake Michigan and put it in my pocket and whisper “Thank you.”

There are little altars everywhere in my life —altars to love, to the luminous thread that connects— and I suppose I’ll keep building more.

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Practice

Today create an altar for yourself. Walk outside, collect a few natural items that are symbolic of something that matters to you —or that simply delight or fascinate or call to you. Place them on a plate or in a bowl. Leave it out on a table or somewhere that you’ll see it occasionally for a few days, maybe stop and touch the items, breathe in the spirit of what you love.

Question

In my expanded definition of altars, have you created altars in your life. Tell us about one.

Feathers

So much of the immaterial world
Is perched on our material shoulders
A bird that sings
And sings again
With a song so intimate
It might go unnoticed
But for the feathers 
That keep showing up
On the dresser
Next to the coffee cup
In a coat pocket
Unworn since last winter.

I mean, who knew 
That while I searched and scanned 
The unknowable horizon
With ardent and determinedly polished binoculars 
All that I needed
Was already 
Patiently waiting 
Close as my earlobes. 
Which face it, 
Are easy to miss
As unassuming
And practically placed as they are.

How easy it is to look anywhere
And everywhere
But here
For what lights easy on our shoulders
And what the heart already knew.

By Carrie Newcomer 

Tour Schedule

A portion of the proceeds of my Sept. 14th, BCT will benefit The Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington Indiana’s Get out the Vote efforts.

I hope you join us for this fun show. I’m so excited to be performing with Gary and such a beautiful string quartet. AND love that Jason Wilber will our very special guest!

Tickets are going fast. Here’s the link!

For more info visit www.carrienewcomer.com/tour\