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.

Bench #7

Sacred space is place where you can find yourself again and again. It is a place where regardless of the time, date, weather, or any other circumstance you can count on to be a retreat and help you learn and reflect on yourself. A space like this is the first place you’ll run to and the place that will always remain the same.  When thinking of one place where I feel completely free from any worry and accepting of everything around me is bench #7.

            My Gram’s favorite place in the whole world was a bench in a little opening on the coast of Ogunquit, Maine; bench #7. When she passed, her ashes were spread along the shore so that she could always be in the one place that made her the happiest. I never realized until that moment how much that space meant to her, and how much it would mean to me from then on. There is no other place that makes me feel calm and serene like sitting on this bench, watching the wave’s crash, and breathing in the fresh air. Being there allows me to forget everything that shouldn’t matter and focus back to the simplest of times. It’s like an instant transfer back to being six and playing in the sand, being with the people who meant the most to me, and not having a worry in the world. Remembering those moments and staying connected to my past is what I find sacred.

            The right brain recognizes images and objects connecting them with emotion and feeling. The feeling that I get when I’m in my scared space connects directly back to memory of the importance to my grandmother. The left brain deals a lot with time and the history throughout it much like the memories that I made throughout my childhood in this space. The memories behind scared spaces are what give them meaning to a person. The caves and paintings of the Aborigines had a deeper meaning to them. They told their story and gave them a place to solely remember and reflect on it. It’s not the space that has the meaning; it’s the history behind it.

The Power of Thought

Having just eaten a banana, I am left wondering of the many trivial and interesting facts pertaining to the magnificent fruit. For example, a cluster of bananas is called a hand, and each individual banana a finger. What’s more interesting is that contrary to popular belief, bananas do not actually grow on trees, but rather from a tree-like perennial herb. But of course, I do not simply spend my time solely thinking of bananas. No matter what it may be that I am wondering about, the point is that I have something to wonder about. The ability to wonder is the reason why my mind is my sacred space.

The human mind is a powerful creator. It can construct images for your eyes to see, sounds for your ears to hear, and sensations for your body to feel. The ability to process such abstract thoughts is most definitely a more recent development on the human timeline, making the act of thought a left-brained activity; however, I do not believe all aspects of the human mind belong to the left side. There is a more primal and possibly even animalistic characteristic belonging to the act of thought that we saw in class when watching Dr. Nigel Spivey speak of the San people of South Africa. Through deep thought individuals were able to enter trances, or possibly the dreamtime, and became unresponsive to the physical world around them for certain periods of time. I would argue that such a function, such states of meditation or removal, might actually be primordial, belonging then of course to the right half of the brain. 

Sacred Outer Space

My sacred space doesn't truly exist. I have been moved from house to house so frequently that I have made no connections with specific areas and whatnot. Also my family is strange and disjointed so I could never truly connect to anyone in it and call them my sacred space. My relationships with partners and even friends are often semi-volatile and don't often end up being anything I can really retreat to either. My true sacred space is intellectual and abstract thought that betters who I am and my understanding of the world around me. Sure, sometimes I find it comfortable to spill my guts out to a friend or companion, but I'm more at peace with myself and my life when I can shut down everything around me and talk about the mathematics that makes everything work in the amazing universe that we call home.

It's very peaceful to actually think about how small and insignificant each person is to the whole of all being, yet it's beautiful to see how one person can change the consequences of all people, and life as we know it. Math and Physics are fun to me, but the real fun is trying to describe things that happen in the real world in all variables and seeing the elegance of the universe. I like to learn all of the theories, old and new, that try and connect everything in the universe so I can see how people have progressed. Connecting things which may seem very counter-intuitive to scientific thought and progression to the very same science it rejects or excluded accidentally is fun too, because you can see where either science breaks down and we've reached a limit or you can see where the text/idea breaks down and needs to be considered non-literal or multi-meaningful.

Anyone could find some tranquility (or even spirituality) in Math and Science if he or she were to look hard enough. Ask the big questions, the ones with variables that can be used to model any specific thing, and you'll soon see the beauty and magic of the modeling power of mathematics. Apply those models to the real world or universe and you'll see that they work or they do not work, and that is the beauty of physics I can escape to. Just remember the next time you are feeling down that there are billions of hydrogen molecules under a lot more pressure than you are on the sun and that anyone can be the one person to figure out the mysteries of the universe and change life as we know it, forever.

The One Room That's Mine

           My room has eggplant walls with a gargantuan tapestry on one wall. I have the coziest bed anyone has ever sat in. My desk lamp emits a soft light perfect for reading. My room smells of incense and perfume. I organize my room to have as much visual balance as possible. My shelves are organized by art supplies, my alter, and my movies, CDs, and keepsakes. All that is precious to me lives in my room along with myself. Including the items that show the different "sides" of me. My sacred space is also the environment where I do most things, similar to the Aborigines in the Discovery Channel documentary that considered the Earth to be sacred space that they did their everyday things in. They saw everything as being sacred and incorporated in the dreamtime. Similarly, everything in my life has a place in my room, and can then be categorized, in a way, of left and right brain.
         
           Since my room contains things that are involved in left and right brain thinking, that's how I encounter my room. Writing and reading, which are left brain things are required in doing homework, an activity which I do exclusively in my room. I also have various sequential routines that I do at different times of the day. Lastly, laying in my bed is where I have the clearest mind or the most time to clear my head to have logical thoughts and where I can sort out my life. That time alone is the only time I have to be non-verbal and so my logical thoughts are also entertaining the right side of my brain by allowing me to only have my thoughts and not be forced into speech. Back to how the items in my room exercise the different sides of my brain, I have my art supplies and my alter in my room so I have my art and faith, both almost always accompanied by music. This is why I considered my room more of a sacred space than water, because it hold all that is a part of me.

Spirituality of The Beastie Boys

Why would anyone choose this?

People that don't like rap music irk me. Whether it's because the borderline offensive, yet playful lyric or because its intense poetic and rhythmical fluctuations, I have come to love rap music. I started intensely getting into it as a freshman football jock who was forced out of his punk rock ways as he listened to the rap that was played in the locker room. It's not that I hadn't heard it before, but like many other people, I just dismissed it for brutish music that takes little to no talent.* Another thing happened to me that first year of high school that changed me forever; I had Mr. Kersey as a teacher. He often put up rap quotations on his white board to inspire creative thought and analysis based on them, but it also inspired me to start looking into rap music, because just like any other form of music, you must sift through the mud to get the gold. And so I did. The Beastie Boys' Solid Gold Hits was one of the first albums I had encountered and very quickly I had fallen in love with the obnoxious tones of Ad-Rock (Adam Horovitz), the wisdom of MCA (Adam Yauch), and the Micheal Diamond (Mike D) wildcard. It wasn't until I listened to a lot of rap music that I could listen to the Beastie Boys and understand the morals that they include in their music. I also have a tie to Judaism through my father, and though I was never raised to believe in any specific thing, Jews really intrigue me and I like everything that I read about them. It gets kind of weird sometimes. And the cool thing about the B-Boys is that because they include personal morals and whatnot throughout their music, I could trace it back to their Jewish culture and maybe even look into why MCA decided to convert to Buddhism. The Beastie Boys also produced music over a long period of time, so it's interesting to see how they grow and develop too and how their view points on things changed. I hope y'all like my paper.

*In retrospect, I would argue that it doesn't take much talent to bash an electric guitar and yell angry words about government and whatnot into the microphone either, but that's how I saw it

Do Homeless People Have Sacred Space?

I feel that I have several sacred spaces, which forced me to make a choice. I love the inviting nooks of my bedroom, the calmness of a white-clothed table at The Thai Garden, and the chilly floors of the fiction room at Keene High School. Above all of those, one stood out for me. On the Ashuelot River bike trail there are little alcoves next to the river with benches in them. Mine is the furthest down, almost directly behind the hospital. It feels sacred because you rarely ever see another person there-- it feels like you're detached from the modern world and exist as part of the forest. I don't really go here by myself for safety reasons, but it is a wonderful place for quiet conversation and reflection. It molds itself perfectly to any sentiment, whether that is sadness or a joyful picnic.

When sitting here, one can see just a little bit of the river, a field, and the forest surrounding them. Occasionally a rogue homeless person is spotted, but they disappear as quickly as a small animal would. It is calm, sometimes eerily so. The ground is covered in little pebbles, which I like to throw and try to hit the trees so they bounce back to me. The bench is chained to the ground, which adds to its sacredness because it feels permanent. I think age makes places feel more important because they hold so many stories.

Today, we honor the spaces and rituals of ancient peoples (like the Aborigines) because they existed for so much longer than our American civilization has. Places definitely have emotional value for people because they give setting to our daily lives, religion, and ritual. If a church did not have the connotation of being the house of God, it would just look like a building. If the cave containing pre-historic art was not part of an ancient ritual, it might just be a hole with some old paintings. It's not my bench that is sacred-- it is the way I feel around it.