Shrines
& a painting of a shrine
I started a painting this morning just for fun - just for the sheer pleasure of moving color on canvas. Well, first, I had my own private silent disco session with Chappell Roan in my earbuds, ate some granola, and pulled a few oracle cards - but then I started painting.
It’s a painting of the Buddha. I love images of the Buddha because of the way they make me feel. When I look at them, sit with them, I am instantly aligned with the energy of peaceful creation, of cosmic love.
A painting is a sort of altar, a shrine.
I have little altars and shrines all over my house and in my garden and in my heart. Clusters of objects, statues, dried flowers, incense, pretty rocks, notebooks, tiny ceramics, mugs filled with paintbrushes. I stand at them and move through rituals of hope.
The following is a post from my archives - a travel diary from a trip we took to Woodstock, New York in 2023. You can read about our 2022 trip here, here, and here.
I am sitting on a soft bed with polka dot sheets in Woodstock, New York. It’s Friday night and I can hear the music from the beer garden down the street. The air moving through the pine trees and coming in the window screen is cool and crisp and reminds me of my childhood. Tracy and I sat on the porch earlier, watching the deer graze.
We came in here hoping to heal.
I’ve been going along in my life lately, waking up everyday, setting about my tasks, increasingly aware that I have less and less energy, less and less vibrancy, less and less creative fire. My body feels heavy and slow and out of alignment. My soul is threadbare. I came back from a walk into town earlier, sat down by the creek and said to the trees, “I don’t belong anywhere.”
I told Tracy recently, there is a time period in my life that I think of as the worst I ever felt and recently, I have felt that bad again. I have made it back to my low point, which is not a journey I’d intended on making. Interestingly, the Hudson Valley has been there for me both times.
When I was young and struggled to get up off the floor in Brooklyn, I would sometimes get pull myself together enough to get to Grand Central and travel to Cold Spring. One and a half hours by train, but a different world. The trees were so lush and green. I would walk around, in and out of little antique stores and sit on the banks of the Hudson River and breathe the humid air and remember that not everyplace was harsh.
The Hudson Valley held me then and it holds me now with its unexpected rain showers and fawns prancing across the lawn and katydids. I am in much more harmony energetically, politically, aesthetically with Woodstock than I am Kentucky. I could easily live here, but it is not my home. Of course, I remember being nine or ten, standing at the bottom of the hill in front of my house, looking out at the Kentucky farmland in every direction, and thinking, I don’t belong here. It wasn’t that I didn’t love the land or my family or my hot pink bedroom, because I did. Perhaps, I thought, I don’t belong on planet earth, yet I am here, an earthling. I was born here, into this body and I remain alive even now. These are living fingers typing this post. My heart continues to beat, though admittedly, with a slight murmur.
Where is my sense of belonging? Does the answer lie in in the curving roads of Ulster County? In the boxes of notebooks in my Kentucky basement?
I have grown increasingly unable to sit with dogma or doctrine of any kind. I have grown increasingly distant from concepts that once intrigued me. I have no interest in spiritual spaces or ideologies that exclude transgender men or women, Black and brown people, nonbinary people. I am no longer even vaguely interested in conspiracy theories that serve no purpose but to dehumanize us and make money for those who already have more than enough. I have no interest in theologies that preach to me of a temperamental god who demands adherence to a set of rules.
I believe god speaks in beauty and nature and loving touch. God is in pigment and water and ink. God is wild and expansive like a starry sky. God cannot be contained nor does god wish to contain us. I’m not convinced god wishes for anything. I don’t think god is like that. I cannot name god, define god, nor draw a line around them, and I am acutely aware of the problems intertwined with the word, what that word implies, how it makes people feel.
I know that god is in the land. There are fairies here, in the trees, by the rushing waters of the creek. No one could convince me otherwise. There is magic in the mountains, and in my blood because I am human, divine, born of the fragrant ground and the twisting vines. Born of desire.
When I first encountered the work of Clark Strand and Perdita Finn, I was immediately drawn in. I was drawn in by the beautiful, intelligent writing and by the idea of non-religious community built around devotion and metaphysical experience. I was drawn in by ecology-based spirituality, a spiritual vision of a divine mother without the confinement of doctrine. The openness.
When we arrived in Woodstock this year, we drove out after a heavy rain to find the shrine, which is, incidentally, the same road one would travel to go to Levon Helm’s barn. When we pulled into the drive, we saw a man walking back from his mailbox. The man was Clark Strand. He came over to the car to greet us. He introduced himself to Rocky, who was in my lap. I fangirled for a while and Clark stood there, gentle, grounded, kind.
He went on to his house and we walked down to the shrine in the mud, escorted by mosquitos. The energy was calm and luminous. I placed a bundle of herbs and lavender from our garden at her feet, a prayer of gratitude and petition for assistance.
I used to prayer to her decades ago, holding a rosary in my bedroom in New York. Perhaps you remember me, I whispered.
When I talk to her, to whom am I talking? An actual woman? A goddess? An angel? A myth? An egregore? My own self? When I talk to my guides, am I talking to entities separate from myself, or am I talking to parts of myself that exist outside the limitations of time and space? When I pray, am I in communion with god, or am I simply calling into the void as a way to keep myself alive?
I don’t know these answers or any answers, and I don’t know why I spend so much time here, in the domain of the spirit, wondering about the meaning of life, or if there is a meaning, and then fabric of the cosmos and the miracles and magic that has made itself known, and been hidden, throughout human time.
I bought Sophie Strand’s book The Madonna Secret at The Golden Notebook. It’s a thick novel with a beautiful cover.
We also visited the Woodstock Shivastan Poetry Ashram: Book Store, Art Gallery & Giftshop where I purchased a Ferlinghetti poem printed on handmade paper in India.
It was the celebration of Ganesh’s birthday, so the proprietor Shiv Mirabito, so open, so kind, took us out back to the garden, to the Ganesha shrine.
There are so many shrines here in Woodstock, Buddhas on every porch, and the shrine of nature all around. Portals to love, beginnings, the removal of obstacles. I have come to place my life on this green altar and open my heart to assistance, to clarity.
When we are in this place, we encounter people who live their lives as if the living of life were an art form, which of course, it is. We experience synchronicity. Here, we sleep with the windows open and have our morning coffee with the deer. The mountains hum a sweet magic, misty in the morning, dappled sunlight in the pine trees in the afternoon. My soul craves these things just as it once, decades ago, craved the movement and light of the city. New York has never failed to meet me where I am and offer me healing, so I have asked, every day for the past two weeks, I have asked the spirits of this land for help.
What I didn’t know when I came back from that walk and sat by the creek and said that I didn’t belong was that a deer was lying in the grass next to me, its front legs folded in repose. Tracy saw it from the mudroom window.
When I see a tree with a hollow place carved out, forming a natural shelf where you could, if you were so inclined, place a small statue of The Madonna or The Buddha with a cobalt blue candle, or red, and a small offering of herbs or incense. When I see such a tree with its rough bark and strong gnarled limbs, I think surely that it what my heart looks like. The altar of my heart.
It is Saturday morning the day of the Autumnal Equinox. We are turning now toward the season that feels the most alive to me. In my mind I am dressed in moss and velvet, walking softly through the amber woods but in reality, I am sitting in a hotel room in Hagerstown, Maryland, preparing for the last leg of our journey.
A few nights ago in New York, a dream voice spoke to me and said, “You’re unwell because you’re not making the art of your soul.”
I suppose that is always the root of illness, just as creation is the root of wellness.
I do not believe we are here on this planet to live out a predetermined destiny. My soul does not have a mission other than to simply to live, and with as much love and joy and awe as I can muster for as long as I can muster. The places in my life that feel deadened and hopeless can only be revived by artistic expression. Paint and stories. Truth-telling. Exploration.
I am grateful this morning for the wild and for music, winding backroads, and people who are living on their own terms, carving out unique paths for themselves, channeling sacred life force through their veins and pouring it out onto canvas and pages, singing into open mics, living in the shops where they sell vintage books, rising before the sun to make bread, dancing at drum circles in the rain.
I am reminded that we create our lives by living them.
I will continue to seek belonging, or at least to imagine what it must be like to belong, but I will do so in the understanding that art is belonging. We each belong to the art we make and the only art worth making is that which is true to itself and knows there is no one to please and no one to impress. There is only love and death and rebirth in every breath.
This is the painting I did to commemorate our visit with Our Lady of Woodstock
