Prayer shack

I’m building what I call a prayer shack. It’s out back in my yard. It’s not big, in fact it’s only a little bigger than a chiclet, I’d say.

Perhaps it is the advent of winter solstice that inspired it. Built of cedar and hemlock and pine, the shack is sited so as to take in the sun’s orbit as we shift through the seasons. My skilled woodworker friends, Pat and Keith, found it not unusual when I hauled out a compass to place the footprint of the building in a consecrated alignment.

Sunrise is most important, and I’m happy when I’m awake to greet it. I like the idea of the eastern door, the passage of mythologies. Unlike western thought, where we ride off into the sunset, I buy walking into the sunrise.

And the western window? It’ll have a shelf under it, wide enough to hold a martini or a pilsner glass; to celebrate the end of each day. The north side will be a high wall, welcoming the evenness of north light through top windows; inviting the starlit heavens of night. Imagine a wall as an over-sized doodle pad on which I can scribble and sketch and stick up raw ideas born in the cradle of silence.

The place will have screens for the ‘squitoes of June, the glowing winds of September. It will have south windows to catch the still of mid-day February. There are no plans for furniture, appliances, devices: a couple of handmade rugs and large pillows on the old plank floor will serve just fine.

You see, like me ol’ self, the building materials arrive with a history. Doors, windows, walls, floors, roofing and even the door knobs have lived former lives in buildings big and small. I like that about a place when the voices carry from the cracks and crevices, from every inch of a sanctuary.

While this sacred place is intentionally humble, it will be thoughtfully designed and aesthetically— a word dear to me—interpreted. The shack itself will be art, a thing of grace. Because, for me, it is through grace where creation thrives; the fifth dimension.

The healing Rasa; humility; letting go of ego; of stuff: Travelling out of my mind. Art, somewhat like religion, is a search for higher meaning; and a hell of lot more fun. We get to play with childlike curiosity, un-tethered from the “baggage of the way things are supposed to be”; Un-tethered from hand-me-down patterns and beliefs. We get to ask a lot of questions: we are without limits in proposing ‘what ifs’.

Like any practice, the role of the artist is a day-to-day engagement, a passage through which we may remember our selves. A retreat to my prayer shack connects with a sense of wonder, of awe, of wholeness adding up to fulfilment and enthusiasm for what I do.

I recently looked up the word enthusiastic. It derives from the Greek enthousiasmos. ‘Theo’ as in God; ‘en’ as in ‘in’. To be inspired, which by connotation is a sort of divine madness? The philosophers—the lovers of wisdom— were natural rivals to those claiming poetic inspiration. Inspiration un-tethered from reason, they said, was in itself madness.

For me, the un-tethered part is why a prayer shack. It is a gathering place of inspiration. I then can fuel my mind and allow it to interpret a conveyance in whatever art language I envision. Grab onto a medium where with imagery, form, line and metaphor, I seek to articulate thoughts and dreams, to share a view of being and the world in ways where words assuredly fail.

For me, the practice of the artist is sacred; it is a calling; it is to venture through the veil, to places profoundly felt. Unknown, we yearn to make them known. Therefore, it is a road on which in absolute trust that there exists an Absolute, we search out truth; a want to connect the dots of what it means to be human, to be alive. It is a chosen way of life.