Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Discovering and Creating Sacred Space...

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.
- Joseph Campbell

   One of the inspiring parts of last weekend's SoulCollage® retreat was the ritual of creating sacred space.  It is a very important part of the process of creating and reading your cards.    I have understood this concept through my labyrinth walking ritual, which I posted on Monday, but I love the idea of applying it to other spaces as well.  Like the SoulCollage® cards I made during the weekend, sacred space can be either intentionally created or intuitively discovered. 

   Nature, for me, is the supreme intuited sacred space but truly any place can become sacred by intentionally making it so.  This image is of the loggia at the retreat center.  I love the look of the vaulted ceiling painted azure blue to mimic the sky.  Painting porch ceilings blue is a tradition in New England and I like to think it is a way to welcome Nature into the enclosed space...opening it up.  It was too cool to access this space during the weekend but I could see this being a wonderfully uplifting and sheltering sacred space.

   When you are out in the landscape, find ways to bring the intention of sacred space into the experience.  It can be as easy as just welcoming the sacred qualities of the place into communion...the warm sun, the feel of the wind on your cheek, the buzz of the bees hard at work at their gathering task as you prepare to gather in images.  All of these are elements of the discovered sacred space. Visual listening exercises are my ritual for creating sacred space in the places I photograph.  

   When I do PhotoLectio with my contemplative imagery it is important that I create a special place and time to do it.  It only adds to the significance of the process for me.  That is what creating sacred space does...it sanctifies the experience.  You might like to discover a few ways you can carve out sacred space for yourself.  The link below is a good place to start.  



2 comments:

foxysue said...

I have a few 'sacred spaces', one is my window ledge, with sacred glass pieces that reflect the light at different times of day. The other is my walk by the five little ponds that rise up one above the other, the top pond has a tree that hangs over the water, under this tree is another sacred space, you can contemplate the water for hours...x

Patricia Turner said...

thank you for sharing your personal sacred spaces! I think it is so important to carve out places where, as Joseph Campbell says, we can find ourselves again and again.