Pick a summer from 1971 to 1975 and I will tell you that season’s mud story.
How I molded water with earth to create irrigated pyramids with secret chambers.
The intricate ways I wove wildflowers and rainwater with soil and dandelion stems to shape them into gooey pies the size of cow patties.
What I heard when my stacked rocks would scrape against each other as I piled them biggest to smallest as high as the sky, filling the gaps with wet clay and grass.
Where I oriented myself in the field, which trees called to me, and at what hour of the day I felt most connected to Creator energy.
Why I preferred dirt under my nails to shimmering pink paint atop them.
When I stopped making little altars and believing in the goddess of mud.
Tell me what you make and how you enshrine it, and I will know a little something about who you are, the things you value, and what gets you through a day and saves you just a little. What’s that you just mumbled? You don’t make anything? I don’t believe you.
Hey, I’m not looking for great architecture here. Or anything necessarily lasting. I’m not even talking about a physical cathedral, people. Just an instrument you take down, to quote Rumi, that inspires you to let the beauty you love be what you do & that has you kneeling + kissing the ground in some way.
Maybe it’s a bird you feed, a flower you tend you, or a paintbrush you sometimes lift, or in my case, a collage card as a kind of oracle, or a poem I curate and blow out onto the winds like so many dandelion seeds because rock, paper, scissors, glue, poetry.
Jimmy Carter built houses. Day Schildkret makes intricate earth altars. My son crafts cocktails. The eccentric dude who came to service our grandfather clock the other day tinkers with timepieces from centuries ago. My father-in-law builds jigsaw puzzles and cool artists galore are out there making beautiful, winged creatures from scrap computer parts.
We humans are a glorious and symphonic mix tape.
Still stuck because you glanced around and don’t see a single thing you’ve ever made or done? Look again. Chances are your cathedrals are more esoteric. Perhaps they were fashioned from your work in the world, your words of encouragement, your core fandoms, your adventures, or your quieter ways of being and doing.
Or maybe you’re that multi-passionate who has an over-populated village of steepled cathedrals and you don’t know where to start. Start with the obvious ones, absolutely, but then do yourself a favor and before the o’dark hour of your days gets too late, bring those other shrines and altar adornments out from where they’re hiding. Dare to take down those instruments, as Rumi instructs, dust them off, and tune them.
See if you can count your neglected cairns that, like me once upon a long time ago, you’d spit on and polish to add shine, to then stack as high as the heavens on a sunny summer day.
Who or what did you once love that warrants a page in your
scrapbook, photo album, gallery room, or obituary?
If time, money, and fear masked as apathy were no issue,
what would you happily spend your days doing?
Bonus points if you re-devote yourself to the process of inventorying and handmaking these beauties, with master craftsman attention to detail and form and function, and without any expectation that it will be your get rich quick scheme. Extra bonus points if it’s private or off the grid, doesn’t involve AI, and if it doesn’t live on the interwebs in any way that might give your ego a popularity meter, a world stage, and the external validation it so desperately craves.
Be like Gaudi. Let your little shrine circus of oddities (which rhymes with (god)dities or is it Gaudities?) continue to be born and to outlive you and to make you famous in your afterlife.
Follow your ley line.
How To Build a Cathedral }
by Nils PetersonThe leaves outside my window shake with a deeper
movement than the continuing ripple of the morning,
midsummer breeze. “Squirrels,” I think, and think
of how I know they’re there although I cannot see them,
not a large movement, but enough if you paid
attention. This is how the ancients found the holy places,
then followed the ley lines that led from one to another.
Earth makes a gesture. Some subtle thing moves.
“Ah,” you say, then “Ah” again, if you are paying
attention and mark where you are. Maybe you leave
a stone you’ve carried because it felt good in your hand.
Another person does the same. Soon there’s a cairn,
then a cathedral where boys like me pay no
attention, but sing the mass beautifully anyway.from A Letter
I love this so much! It resonates so strongly in my heart. Thank you Danna.