Writing Prompt for Tuesday, November 10, 2009
I used to try to be driving somewhere at 9:00 AM so that I could catch Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac on NPR, but a few years ago a friend told me that I could just have it sent to my email inbox every day.
So, I subscribed. I encourage anyone, whether or not you love poetry, to become members of this list, especially if you are a writer, or want to be a writer.
The prompt for today is based on Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Stephen Dunn’s poem, The Sacred, which appeared on the Writer’s Almanac on November 8. I had the good fortune to work with Stephen Dunn one summer when I attended the Stonecoast Writer’s Conference, and the extreme luck (since she works with only a handful of students) to have his wife, Barbara Hurd as my first semester mentor at the Stonecoast MFA Program. I recommend not only both of these writers as people you should read, but also both of these writing programs.
Please read The Sacred.
Then write a poem, short short, essay, or memoir piece about your sacred space.
Post here for feedback.
Don’t think, just write!
sacred is a term
that doesn’t really apply
to me
Do you
know the true meaning
of sacred?
Is it
something thats blessed
and holy?
Could it
be something protected
and immune?
Either way
neither of these terms
apply to me.
Sorry, Kristin. I think you are sacred and blessed.
Haystack
Oh! the places I’ve been. Spent time in an ashram outside Delhi where they keep a sacred fire burning 24/7 and it is always tended by some dozey someone. It is dedicated to peace on our planet and I like thinking of that fire burning when I read the results of a vote like last weeks or hear about Ft Hood. Every minute of each day someone cares.
Stayed in a cave in New Mexico – really dark, black silence. Each year I try to stay silent for a week – try that if you are looking for a challenge.
Have a Buddhist shine in my art room where I do my thing, burn a little nag champa, finger the beads.
But lately I have come to call a place on the Maine Coast my retreat, my sacred place. On the top of the stone hill overlooking Jehrico Bay, past the eagle nested in pine and way past the lichen blankets sits my hut. My secret people walk up and down the steep stairs heading off to grab a cuppa poured into a mug made by someone or other in the clay studio. Not a silent place at all but a place of words passed around like an appetizer or a dessert. This suits me better than silence and darkness. The height of the place, the loft, the wish to know. Let me tell you who I am. Tell me you.
I have two sacred places: my basement, and my mind. They have much in common. While they both serve as vitally important foundations; one of my home and one of my self; one subterranean and one subconscious, they are, most of the time, dark, damp, unoccupied, under utilized and under appreciated. They are both chock full of stuff – some very useful tools, some old rusty ones, boxes of memorabilia and artifacts of my past, and piles, heaps, stacks and mountains of what some people (perhaps most) would consider utterly useless junk. Worthless. Nothing. It is often difficult to move around, and even more difficult to find a particular item amid the jumble, but I know it’s down there, somewhere. They are cluttered (filthy?) and chaotic (crazy?) places and one of my grandest, most ambitious goals in life is to someday instill a sense of order and meaning to all that has accumulated there.
And yet, they are sacred places to me, just as they are. Not because of the chaos, nor in spite of it, like the randomness of nature or the ruin of a medieval church. It is because, when I am deep within these places, alone and undisturbed, I am able to be my most creative. I can make connections between things that would otherwise never have been put together. I can imagine new possibilities, move in new directions, create something new and interesting; in some cases, useful, maybe even beautiful, out of (what some might call) nothing.
Very good, Mr. Tibbs. I guess Mrs. Tibbs will have a new appreciation for basement and mental muddles since you expressed yourself in a language she might understand!
….seems kind of corny upon reread, but here it is…
My Sacred Space
My sacred space is in my mind. I take it wherever I go. Inside my sacred space, all music is emotionally charged and full of color. Inside my sacred space, all nature is magically divine and showing off just for me. Inside my sacred space, I feel the thread of connection and love of all humanity. But for some incredibly human reason, I forget my sacred space exists, and live amid the rawness of despair. My space gets filled with junk. Words that hurt, fears that worry, pains that distract, all fill the space, leaving little room for me. When I finally remember to take a breath and visit, I am fully present. Laughter and love act as duster and polish to help clean out my sacred space. But only when I’m fully inside the space will it stay clean, and I am safe.
Ahhhh, Deb! I’m with you there! Next spring perhaps in person. Yes?
It had taken over a year of hard labor and stringent saving, but it was finally mine. My very first car. Living in a one-bedroom house with four people left very little room for privacy. The car – my car – offered me my own space. I didn’t even need to go anywhere. Anytime I need to escape and be by myself, my car gives me a place to be by myself and listen to the radio without interruption.
It was in October when I bought it – giving me a couple months to enjoy it without worrying about winter. At my old job we had a milk crate in the kitchen for a seat, and that was where you sat for lunch. If someone else was occupying that space, you were out of luck, as I often was. And if you did get that space, you had to put up with country music, various arguments and objects being thrown in your general direction (as the crate was next to the sink). Not the best place to enjoy a lunch. My car changed all of that – I often ate in my car after that, with the radio on, and without any annoyances from my co-workers. Eventually it got to be too cold to eat in my car, unless I left it running. Then I realized I could drive to other places to eat my lunch… what a concept!
To this day, I still eat alone in my car at lunch, even though I’m at a completely different job. There’s just something special about being able to escape from my co-workers, and to enjoy a meal alone, even if it’s only for half an hour.
I still dream about my first car, and I always will. It was more my home for the five years I had it in my early twenties than any of the other places I lived.
Lisa – The mind. Not corny at all. Even the dudes at MIT are trying to figure out how it all works. Great space to make your secret hiding place – like when a kid you could find the places in a tree where you could hide and look out at the world. Just hang on and watch and sing your song.
Joe – What model was that first car? I imagine it was green and full of cool stuff.
It’s a bit rhymie but this is what tumbled out.
Sacred space, my sacred place.
Sacred love, my saving grace.
The beat of your heart, against my ear,
used to be where I felt safe.
Sacred space, my sacred place.
Sacred love, my saving grace.
Sorrow rises like a flood.
let it drown in lust and love.
I think rhymie is fine….just fine.
When I first think of my sacred place and where it is exactly, I go blank and this makes me feel bad. I have a room that was recently built for me by my husband that is meant to be exactly that but I haven’t formed a ritual or a relationship with the space yet. I asked for the space because I know I need a sacred space that is just mine yet, I don’t use it now that I have it. It is a touchy subject for me and a source of some guilt. I keep waiting for my husband to say something about how little I’m using it but that’s my way not his. Part of the problem is that I’m really good at wasting time especially on my computer. I have more time in the mornings now because I get my daughter off to school early enough to actually do something productive and useful before I go teach. Yet, I still don’t get up to my “sacred” space. Maybe it’s too sacred but I don’t think so. This morning I made phone calls to stop receiving phonebooks, which is important but is it more important than the comtemplative time I would have had in my sacred space? I don’t think so. I, like so many, balk at having a relationship with self. And this is coming from a yoga teacher and someone who is on a path to better myself. It is still really hard to keep the commitment to honor myself and my journey in a way that is truly meaningful and on a regular basis. Funny, my first thought when I read the prompt is that it wasn’t applicable to me because I don’t have a sacred space but it turns out it really is and I really do.
Reading this Melinda, I felt so glad that I am not the only one who does not (yet) make use of her sacred space. I think it is because that place is not yet sacred; like you said, I have yet to create a relationship within its walls. My default sacred space seems to be on the futon under a ratty old quilt my grandmother made, but this, I reject as sacred because I USE it…..now what does that say about sacred space?
“The water wants to hold you up. You just have to let it.” My mother said this to me over and over again as I learned to swim. I never took formal swimming lessons growing up. My parents were both teachers, so with meager salaries but ample time off, we spent our summers swimming. Each year we rented a cottage on a small lake located in the next town over. Close enough to spend the entire month of July by the water and still drive home to water the garden during the dry spells.
My parents were both strong swimmers, but my dad was the stuff of legend. He was a lifeguard in his youth, teaching swimming lessons for the Red Cross at the East End Beach in Portland. He’d been known to swim from that same beach to one of the islands in the bay, stopping at Fort Gorges briefly to rest, when he didn’t have the money for the ferry. I’ve always suspected he could easily have afforded the fare, but swam instead, just so he could say he’d done it. In his sixties and seventies when I was a child he still swam with an ease and grace I have rarely witnessed.
Dad got me started swimming at around age 4 with the aid of a low tech flotation device: two empty gallon milk jugs, caps screwed firmly in place and tied together handle to handle with a piece of string. With the string stretched across my chest and under each of my arms and a milk jug floating up behind me on either side, I learned the finer points of the doggie paddle. Up and down along the shore of that little lake I swam and swam until one day I didn’t bother with the milk jugs and struck out on my own.
My dad was a great swimmer, but he didn’t often linger in the lake. He’d make one of his smooth, flat dives into the shallow water at the end of the dock. He’d take long, slow, deliberate strokes with his arms, his legs rarely breaking the surface and he’d glide away going farther from shore than I was ever allowed to venture. He’d return just as quietly, climb out and towel off and be sitting, totally at ease in a chair reading the newspaper so quickly you’d almost think you’d imagined him entering the water in the first place.
It was my mother who would stay in the water with my sister and me while we swam. She’d practice a methodical breaststroke, not with any particular destination in mind, back and forth along the shore, or out and back from the end of the dock. She’d tread water endlessly and seemingly without effort. I’d swim out to her, struggling to stay afloat, wondering how she could be so at ease, so calm while I thrashed, splashed and panted. And she’d say, “Relax. You’re working too hard. The water wants to hold you up. You just have to let it.”
She was right, of course. Listening to those words over and over eventually gave me the courage to trust the lake. I don’t know much about physics or the laws that govern buoyancy, but I’ve found that the slower I move, the more gentle I am with the water, the more it lifts me up. The water is to me a place of utter peace, in which I am weightless, graceful and slightly enchanted. I’ve only to spread my arms and lay back my head and my legs rise slowly to the surface all on their own, my toes emerging and dipping slowly back down, only to rise once more to the air. I tilt my head back farther letting the water fill my ears, softening all the other sounds and filing my head with the muffled hum that is the pulse of the lake. I look up to the tops of the trees along the shore where they stretch up so high, not unlike the exposed ribs of a cathedral roof. And I float. It takes so little effort to be held like this. With each breath in I rise gently up, and then sink gradually with each exhalation and I begin to feel that the lake is breathing with me.
My mother still spends part of every summer in that same rented cottage by the lake. I take my children there now, teaching them to swim, watching them struggle to stay afloat, to conquer their natural and well founded fear of slipping beneath the surface. I try to let them find their own way, guiding them back to the shallow water when they stray, too far. My son who is older is beginning to swim in earnest now. He has my father’s long lanky arms and athletic grace. I suspect he’ll be a powerful swimmer one day but now he struggles in the water not quite trusting it or himself, and I hear myself saying without even meaning to, “You’re trying too hard. Just relax. The water wants to hold you up. You just have to let it.”
Ahhhhh….Tara, essay and memoir seem to just be waiting on your fingertips. Hold your fingers up to your face and thank them.
It’s in my head, or in my ears, really. I can only close the door when they’re filled with buds attached to my ipod. I wouldn’t try to open it if I were you. The music is loud, and there are a bunch of dirty words interlaced into the pounding rhythms. Maybe you see a thirty-four year old doing laundry, or washing the dishes, or spraying foamy stuff on the bathroom counter, but really, I’m seventeen with all the longings and trappings of the age. There aren’t any kids there. No husband either. No house. No bills. No flab. Here’s the rub: when you pull out the ear buds, the door opens, and there I am, sitting quietly, the thirty-four year old you thought you’d find.
Keli, this is a tidy little short short. Nice work.
My sacred space is something that can only happen inside my own self. It is a feeling of being grounded – not grounded to a place – how can it be a place when the places are always changing? More of a feeling of being grounded in my self, alive and feeling in a way that is totally disconnected with the actual physical location of your body. Like the tunnel-visioned euphoria you feel when creating something really spectacular. That feeling of really being IN what you are writing or painting or shaping with your hands. There is no sound, there is no peripheral vision, no second guessing; only the completely serene hush that happens inside your own head, your own veins, inside your own bones. Or the disconnected awareness that parodoxically occurs during yoga. Stretch your own muscles and ligaments and bones so calmly and completely that you can actually feel the seam, the tiny chasm, that exists between your body and your spirit. Disconnected, and aware. Here, and there. Inside my head, and in this place.
I wish I felt this way in my own head, but inside my own head, I feel like I am in a pinball machine!
This a scared place
My very own
It is my bedroom
My map of Middle Earth above me
The picture of Yuna from final fantasy 10 to the left
And the picture of Spawn to my right
In front of me are three theatrical poster for lord of the rings
My portable DVD player resting comfortably on the old wooden chair holding a disc of japnse anime wonderment
My boxes of bagged and boarded comics stacked caring on top of one another
I see them as precious as gold
Here is my fortress
Warm and dry
Keeping me safe under my old quilt and heat pad on my mattress below me
Here is my fortress
My scared place
Writing is a confession of sin
What better place
than a sacred place
to confess
that impurity and profanity
are the deepest darkest lies
we know, the sin
we need to keep
out the claws
that never menaced,
that never tore to pieces
our satisfied skin,
our righteous anger,
our whole walled world.
I confess:
I am complicit
in protecting myself
from all that is,
seen and unseen,
known and unknown.
There is a quarry on an island off the coast of Maine, but it belongs to someone else so I don’t know if I can claim it as my scared space. But I feel sacred when I’m there. Maybe that’s the same thing.
I think it is. You don’t have to own it to own it.
As a member of the clergy, I know people expect me to name the pulpit or the altar or the gathered community as my sacred space, but the truth is, the place that saved my sanity, re-connected me with The Divine and provided a place to pray in silence more times than I can count is…
The bathroom.
Seriously. Especially when I was working in a toxic office environment, I would escape to the tiny little closet of a bathroom once in a while, because it was the only place where I could be completely alone and away from people, phones, demands, dissatisfaction and criticism for a few minutes in the course of a day. And now that I’m clergy, no matter how glorious the space, “church” is still my place of employment.
My Episcopal tradition offers a set of prayers for a house blessing, and the one for the bathroom has always struck me as particularly honest and appropriate:
In a Bathroom
ANTIPHON
I will sprinkle you with clean water, and you will be cleansed.
V. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering:
R. Having our bodies washed with pure water.
Let us pray. (Silence)
O holy God, in the incarnation of your Son our Lord you made our flesh the instrument of your self-revelation: Give us a proper respect and reverence for our mortal bodies, keeping them clean and fair, whole and sound; that, glorifying you in them, we may confidently await our being clothed upon with spiritual bodies, when that which is mortal is transformed by life; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
I am going to go say this prayer in the boys’ bathroom, Nancy, and hope it inspires some cleanliness!
My sacred space is my bedroom window… and not just the window, but the beauty of nature that I can plunge my soul into as I kneel there.
Here is a poem about my sacred place during a sacred time of day.
DAY BREAK
Come; let us take the wings of the morning.
The wild heart of nature will beat against ours,
And we will walk hand in hand with God
In the cold, windy dawn of Autumn.
The eastern horizon is silken apple green,
The sky is smooth dark blue like painted glass.
Venus, jewel of the morning,
Is shimmering over the tossing willows to the west.
The moon is fading out with last night’s dreams.
Orion, the mighty hunter, treads his stately march,
With his bow and his arrow he shoots the dark away
Chasing it over the western hills.
It is here, while kneeling at my bedroom window at all times of the day… from sunrise to sunset, in thunderstorms or snowstorms, to catch the bright rays of summer sunshine or silvery glimpses of moonlight, to hear bird songs and cricket songs, and to watch the sky, that I find renewal and peacefulness.
my sacred space is not one place or thing. my sacred space is an image. i change this image as the my urgency for this scared space increases/changes. in a dentist chair? not the same image as an out of control whiny child requires. upsetting news? a mere trip down memory lane is my space. only i know the real me. i wear many masks to survive in this world, only i put them on, and only i can remove them with my sacred spaces.
When we moved in to our house, we began sectioning off portions of the place. The garage is “his”, one of the extra bedrooms is “his”, half the closest space was “his”. I spend a good portion of time in “my” parts of the house and him in “his”. There is no “common” area, if I decorated it, it’s “mine”. I feel out of place in “his” space, it’s so messy and I fight the urge to clean it. I have to close the door and pretend it does not exist.
A sacred place. What is this place that is sacred? According to the dictionary, sacred is that which is “holy; safe from attack, ridicule, etc.; binding, as a promise” and a place is a “particular point in space; function; social position; stead; lieu”. A sacred place is an environment in which one deems oneself secure and at peace. During my late teens and early twenties, I had two sacred places that I could always depend on when I was in need of a haven from the turmoils of life. One was the Pacific Coast Highway, the other was Silverstrand Beach. Whenever I was dealing with a stressful situation, or grappling with a difficult decision, or burdened by a heartache, I headed for one of these two destinations. I’m not sure what it was about these two places that offered me such calming shelter, because other beaches and coastlines have never measured up to the PCH and Silverstrand. Perhaps it was the familiarity. I have many good memories of driving along the PCH’s swerving path with the sun or moon glistening on the blanket of ocean and dropping gemstones of light into the waves that would be crashing onto the rocks below. Memories of time spent at Silverstrand beach, eating at the little “shacks” along the tiny beach, breakfast at The Jetty Surf Cafe with friends and my husband after a night of drinking at the local bars and lunch at Pepe’s while spending the day surfing. The beaches along the PCH and Silverstrand Beach were also quiet beaches, and well taken care of, not to mention the sunsets were gorgeous. I am sure I was not the only one to consider them a “Sacred Place”. Yet now that I am on the other side of the continent, this new ocean does not feel so sacred. I am still along a beautiful coastline with many beaches, yet it is all so foreign to me. I miss the pleasant misty arms that would wrap themselves around me as the cool sand envelopes my feet and toes. Or the cool ocean breeze that would glide across my face and comb through my hair as I blast the radio playing Deftones on “KROQ 106.7″ or Smashing Pumpkins on “B-95.1″. This is where time did not exist, emotions were only what the radio played and life’s problems… what problems? I failed to remember what rain cloud was raining on my parade that day or time in my life. If only for a few God sent moments, I was lost in a serene peaceful solitude, My Sacred Place.
My sacred space is in the basement of my new house.
I spend lots of time down there working on song ideas or just laying on the couch.
I brought an old tv down there and hooked up an old school nintendo. In my younger days I would consider it a place to get away from everyone but now that my fiancee and I own our own house I have multiple rooms that I would consider sacred. The basement has a really neat smell to it though. It reminds me of the house I grew up in. The walls are covered in concert posters and photographs and I’ve put in a bunch of cabinets that I’ve filled with my musical crap (extra strings, guitar pedals, cords). My friends and I have given the basement the name “Studio AM Gold”. Due to the retro style wood paneling we could easily picture Hall and Oates or Fleetwood Mac hanging out down there. They’d most likely be doing mountains of cocaine. I love my sacred spot!
Holding my hand against the small switches waiting for something to click. Eyes fire past the long lists of random fodder that litter the screen. So many options but nothing that makes an impression. I begin to remember a song that I haven heard in a while I move through the files and find the right one. Listen but still nothing… I always seem to be switching through all of the old music I don’t listen to but continue to keep it. Click. Click. Click. Then there it is. The perfect song.
i had two things come up in response to this prompt….
#1: there are these little bubbles of peace and awareness and connection and general loveliness that pop up out of nowhere, and they make wherever i am feel sacred – a sacred place that i never would’ve found had i been looking for it. this happened again a few days ago at work…
i was putting out red kale that just came in, beautiful redbor kale from up in warren, and really it’s purple, not red, a deep, deep filling-you-up-with-something-you-didn’t-know-you-were-missing kind of purple, and i just love it. i want to scarf up the entire box so it purples me up from the inside and i can BE that purple. it is so fresh and vibrant, and the inside of the stems where they were cut are a fabulously contrasting bright green, still juicy with plant-life, and i am amazed and grateful that something so beautiful exists… and then as i start moving on to something else, stocking apples i think, i catch sight of a water droplet on top of the waxed kale box and there is magic inside that drop, kind of like the magic snow globes had when we were kids and we’d stare at those little miniature worlds, transfixed. there is magic inside it, and then the magic is everywhere, and i remember something that usually i am in the habit of forgetting.
#2: when i was 17, my high school english teacher gave us an assignment: go out in nature for one hour. write about it (we must’ve been reading thoreau). most people didn’t bother, it’s easy enough to fake that sort of paper entirely or do it in a half-ish sort of way like my friend meghan who spent an hour sunbathing in her back yard & listening to the radio. but for some reason, i wanted to actually do the assignment as it was given, which is remarkable because back then i was very much into half-assed effort, procrastination, and not engaging with homework (or much of anything, for that matter) in any sort of meaningful way.
picking the place wasn’t hard: pirate’s point – a little peninsula jutting out into lake winnisquam just down the street from my house, spared from development by its overgrown-ness, its swampiness & rockiness, and the fact that it abuts the neighborhood beach. my brother & sister & i played out there a lot when we were kids. when my parents wanted to use up the battery on the camcorder before recharging they’d let us take it & we’d make adventure movies on the point, me leading a national geographic expedition and my brother pretending to be an angry gorilla in a tree grunting & shaking branches until he accidentally fell out. there was danger out there too, not of the pirate sort, but there were cliffs! only five or six feet up from the lake, but cliffs nonetheless, and you probably could actually get hurt falling off them because the water was so shallow and rocky underneath. we picked blueberries and made elf houses, made bridges over the brooks. adults rarely went out on the point, they didn’t want to bother stooping under all those highbush blues guarding the path. it was our own secret kingdom, like terabithia and never-neverland.
and so i returned, almost at the end of my senior year. i crawled under all the blueberry bushes and walked out to one of the cliffs, and i sat down staring out across the lake. i don’t remember exactly what happened in that hour or what i wrote about the experience, but from my vantage point now, 14 years later, i do remember that being probably the first time i consciously stepped out of my daily routine. and it was shocking, really shocking in a way i don’t know if i can explain. i realized how important that place had been to me as a kid, that it was still important to me, that i felt adrift in my own life. that i wasn’t really happy. i felt a stirring deep in my soul, and i realized at 17 that i’d lost something a long time ago, and i wanted it back. years later i’d understand that this was my first medicine place. i still visit it when i’m in town sometimes, i’ve brought important people there with me (my ex-husband when we were dating, my daughter). but it’s even more overgrown now and it saddens me that the neighborhood kids don’t play down there as much anymore.
Elya, beautiful writing through both of these pieces. Your kale piece could be a prose poem, and the second the beginning of an essay. Thank you for sharing these with me. What is a medicine place? Raye