I'm working to create a healing garden... a little sacred space... a quiet area for peace and introspection... a place for sitting and breathing and imagining. We've planted both medicinal and culinary herbs and started a fairy garden full of butterfly attracting blooms. Today I bundled bushels of lavender and hung it all around the patio.
I'm a big fan of sacred space and have tiny little alters all about my house. Last year I cleared out the bay window in our bedroom and created a mini-shrine room for meditating each morning. We use our fireplace hearth for a nature table where we bring symbols of the seasons indoors to celebrate our interconnection with the earth. A picture of the Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, music and the arts, presides over my kitchen (next to some Jade which is for good fortune) and we bring her fresh rosemary or lavender each morning as an expression of gratitude.
I have an alter-in-a-jar that I take with me to teach yoga to help us unite body, mind, and spirit and to sense the cosmos within. It's just a silver candle plate with a white tea light but in each of the four directions I place a symbol for each of the elements. For earth - a small stone, for water - a shell or a river rock, for air - a feather or an acorn top, for fire - well, the candle! ... and for spirit I keep a dried flower because to me it represents kindness and that comes from within.
I think it's important for kids to have sacred space too... quiet places for them to imagine and create... hallowed ground where they're able to recognize that they are of this earth and not separate from it... commercial-free zones where they can touch the elements and connect with themselves and the world around them.
We're a fast-paced world and it's up to us to create space that encourages us to slow down, to step back, to let the laundry wait and instead just... sit... and breathe. It's not just adults that are effected by the stress of our busy lives. Kids not only feel our stress but have stress of their own. Taking time to nurture their spirit and their creativity creates happy kids. It's a pretty simple equation.
What you put in your sacred space depends, obviously, on what is sacred to you and your kids. We're working on a fairy garden. To us, fairies capture the spirit of childhood. My daughter loves playing like this, making up stories, and acting out their little voices. So far we've converted a bird house into a fairy house by opening up the little round door into an arched doorway, we built a fairy swing with found wood and garden twine, we put together a fairy picnic table with stones and a glue gun, and made a little fairy bed with tree bark and reclaimed prayer flag. We've been making stick stars and decorated a new one for the fairy garden yesterday. Our inspiration came from an AMAZING mama's blog, Ordinary Life Magic (here's the tutorial: http://ordinarylifemagic.com/blog/?s=twig+stars).
Stars have long been a symbol of magic and mysticism and, for many reasons, they feel magical to me. Venus, the planet named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, creates a five pointed star with her orbit around earth every eight years. From ancient Greece and Babylonia to Egypt and beyond, the star has been used as a symbol of a Goddess for centuries. Pythagoras used the star as a symbol for his school which pursued knowledge in mathematics, music, religion, and more. During the times of the Hebrew Scriptures, the star was also an important symbol representing a secret name of God.
Lavender is a symbol of devotion and is said to have been the color of the Buddha's aura. The name lavender comes from the Latin lavare, "to wash," since it was often used in bath and laundry waters. It's been used for centuries as a medicinal herb and is said to relieve stress, anxiety, exhaustion, irritability, headaches, migraines, insomnia, depression, colds, digestion, flatulence, upset stomach, liver and gallbladder problems, nervousness, and loss of appetite. It's smell is calming and breathes a soothing scent into the air where I've tied it in bushels around the patio.
Sacred space can be as small as the space between breaths or as big as the Temple of Artemis. Regardless of size or location, what matters is that we create them... and the most important thing we can bring to our sacred space is ourselves. I'm so grateful for this little healing garden that we're creating. Hopefully, I'll have more luck with herbs than I had with veggies last year... but regardless if my organic healing herbs grow or medicinal recipes work, the space itself has already brought a little more Om into our home. fairy by Little Red Whimsy on Etsy
