On Sacred Space and Lack Thereof

                Since we started talking about sacred space in class, I’ve been trying to think of the place, state of mind, or even person that I would consider my sacred space. The term has no religious connotations for me, since I was raised in a non-religious household despite being baptized and participating in Hallmark-Christian holidays. There isn’t a religious building that I feel particularly comfortable in, and it’s even hard for me to think of a specific place I feel completely at ease in. A few years ago, this question may have been a lot easier. I would have said my room or my grandmother’s home, but a lot of things have changed. Following my parents’ divorce, my own room started to feel different—alien, almost (not to mention I had two rooms instead of one). Rifts in my family have taken the sacred aspect away from my grandmother’s home, also; the childhood experience I associate with the beachside home has dissolved. So I guess the point of all of this is that I don’t know what my sacred space is, if I even have one. I would say the closest thing I have so a sacred space is the state of mind I fall into when I’m writing poetry (as cliché as it sounds), but I can tell that it’s not really my sacred space.

                I’m right brain-oriented, and my pseudo-sacred space reflects upon that. I’ve never liked poetry that focuses heavily on rhyme and rhythm (I think it’s really gaudy), which is evident in my free verse. Poetry, for me, becomes an outlet and a place where I dump every emotion I’m feeling. At times, I use poetry to gauge and reflect when my mind becomes cluttered, and I suppose that’s the left brain aspect: I use it to sort, organize, and remember. While the verse I create is often very impulsive and drenched in raw emotion, it is used to later recollect what I was going through. I connect most to poetry’s initial right-brained nature, but I see and utilize its left-brained effects. While my inability to find a real sacred space separates me from many prehistoric and indigenous groups of people—for they have very definite sacred spaces that remain unfazed as time goes on—there is a connection. I feel as though my pseudo-sacred space is a place where I search for things that are beyond the surface. What comes through my mind in that exact moment is what is relayed on paper or through Word. Although I’m not connecting with God or any religious figure, I am looking further than just myself. The Australian Aborigines give me the same feeling. Their sacred spaces have religious undertones, as they relay back to the spiritual ancestors of Dreamtime, but in those spaces, they are connecting to things deeper than themselves.