Sacred Apartment

A place I consider sacred would be my friend’s dad’s apartment. I met her freshman year and maybe because we didn’t know anything about each other, we felt it was safe to share everything. Now we are best friends and if anything ever happens in our lives we schedule a sleepover to discuss it. It isn’t like we give each other particularly insightful or helpful advice, it is just a space where nothing is a secret and we are completely comfortable. I am not a very open person so this is the only space I really express real emotions in. It’s always warm and she has bunk beds so when I sleep over I’m never condemned to a couch or floor. She’s a vegetarian and generally shares the same feelings towards eating healthy so I never feel gross after living at her house for a weekend.

Having her dad around isn’t weird. Normally at friend’s houses we go to our rooms to escape from parents, but at her apartment there is never any awkwardness and I always feel welcome.  I traveled with her and her dad around Greece so he is almost a second father to me. One of my favorite memories was with my friend and her father on a beach in Greece. She doesn’t plan on going to college and was home- schooled for part of her high school career, so college and grades never seem to make it into our conversations. Being there doesn’t take any effort either. Sometimes you have to convince your exhausted self on a Friday night to leave your cozy living room to go be social, but at her apartment, if there isn’t anything to talk about; we pop in one of her Harry Potter movies, eat snacks, and go to bed. We don’t have to engage in conversation or a real activity to spend time together. The location of her apartment makes it feel like there is a barrier between us and the responsibilities of the world. There is the initial entry which is locked, then hallways, and then, also locked and nestled in the middle of the building, my sacred space.

The unspoken knowledge that we can say and express anything to each other is very left brained. Our ritual of always updating each other first before we begin something else in left brained, yet at the same time unstructured, and therefor right brained, because there is never any pressure to do a real activity. Another left brained characteristic is listening to the problems and drawing conclusions on it. We always try think up solutions for each other as best we can even if we do not really know what we’re talking about.

In Abram’s, The Spell of the Sensuous, he explained how in ancient times before Israel, the Hebrew were always being booted out of places and therefor made the Torah their sacred space.  They took it with them wherever they went so when they were told to leave it wasn’t as devastating. In this way our sacred spaces are completely different. They created theirs and brought it with them wherever they went. Mine doesn’t even belong to me. If they decide to move to a house there is nothing I can do about it and my sacred space is gone. Perhaps their new house could become a sacred space but perhaps not. My sacred space is rooted to the ground and guarded by two locked doors I don’t have the keys to. In Australia’s Aborigines, their sacred space was mountains and caves where ceremonies are held and the dead are buried. My sacred space has no religious connections. Because our generation is less involved with religion than those of past generations, our sacred spaces are less evolved around religion and more around personal emotional desires such as solitude or self-expression. This makes it hard to compare our sacred spaces to past ones people possessed. Either way a sacred space is anything, one, or place that someone finds important for whatever reason. It is a completely personal preference and everybody should respect each other’s.