Tag — shrines

I was away on Dia de los Muertos, but when we got back on the first the girls and I put up our annual altar. This year as we arranged our icons and sugar skulls I noted how this practice, once so unfamiliar, has become increasingly rich for us a family.

This year I turned a postcard of Vincent VanGogh  into another icon for our memorial. It made me wonder, who would you put in a shrine of *8 people who have influenced you? Here are my *8 Saints and Sinners. (God love ‘em!)

1. Vincent VanGogh - a soulmate who helps me journey through pain and creativity.
2. Rosa Parks – an icon made by my husband, who is always inspired by bravery for the sake of justice.
3. Simeon David Chapman – our first child who was stillborn. The girls love putting his tiny tin shrine up for All Souls.
4. Pauline Jarrett Mee - my Grandmother, making her second appearance this year at the shrine.
5. John Everett Mee – my Grandfather, who’s been on our shrine since just after Cate was born. The last thing he did was fly to Seattle to meet her. When he landed back in California, he went straight to the hospital and never returned. But he was determined to deliver Cate’s traditional pair of baby cowboy boots–black with silver sparkles. That was my Buddy.
6. St. Catherine of Sienna — my favorite historical saint and the woman Catie is named after.
7. Mama God – a tiny clay sculpture helps me remember (and regain) the Feminine Divine.
8. Jesus — I firmly believe that “Jesus got ‘jacked.” I miss the real guy, don’t you?

Who are your *8 Saints and Sinners? Tell us in the comments below, or better yet, grab a *8Things  button and play along. Don’t forget that we need the unique permalink in the list. Thanks for playing!

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Posted in 8things, Magpie Girl
Tags: 8Things, Dia des los Muertos, shrines, Soulcare |

I’m thinking about producing a little pamphlet on shrines with photos and essays. Usually I make big plans for projects like then, then the scale of them intimidates me into writer’s block. This time I’m trying to take babysteps. So right now I’m just making a list of shrines I have made and loved. Are there *8 Things that feel like holy space to you? Grab a *8 Things button and play along!

1. an anger altar with plates to break
2. figurines for the feminine divine
3. flash paper and matches for letting go
4. cardboard boxes for Sudan
5. a tin for hard feelings
6. a family shrine for the seasons
7. the gremlin house (? does that count ?)
8. a place for manifesting community

Posted in 8things, Magpie Girl
Tags: 8Things, shrines |

basking in the glow of passover with my monkfish abbey soultribe

This is an ongoing series about How to Build Your Soultribe. Click here for step one and step two, or follow me on Twitter for notification when a new post is up. To listen to this post click here.

A couple weeks ago, Portland artist Jolie Guillebeau wrote to me via Twitter:

“I have a dilemma and I wonder if you can help. How do you properly grieve the loss of your Soultribe, without being bitter?”

Ah, the ten million dollar question!

Part of getting ready for your new Soultribe involves saying goodbye to your old one. I’ve been a part of several meaningful tribes in my past: small groups at church that became and extended family; a group of friends who wanted to build a co-housing together; a group of seekers trying to provide soulcare to one another over beer, bread, and a bowl of soup. Each one of them brought me the gifts I needed at the time I needed them. But leaving them was difficult. The first was closed out of exhaustion. The second ended after mysterious interpersonal fall-outs. The third ended when we decided to move overseas. Each goodbye came with a confusing mix of emotions: anger, gratitude, fear, expectation, sadness, relief.

I am not known for making a graceful exit. I stay too long until I am sick and bitter; or I rush to leave too abruptly. But I am learning a little about leaving a Soultribe–what you take with you, and which bits you have to unpack before you can feel at home again.

Unpacking the Anger
We often leave our Soultribe because of a falling out. This is sad, but what’s the point of pretending it’s not true? Religious groups fight over doctrine. Communes collapse under the strain of what to do with the common purse. Writer’s groups get fed up with each other’s feedback. It happens, and it’s maddening. Here are two things I find helpful in dealing with anger.

1) Honor your Anger. The best way to get bitter is to ignore your angry feelings. Many of you know that I used to have an anger altar in my backyard where I could throw plates at a heap of stones. That’s because I believe anger packs a lot of heat, and discharging that energy can be helpful. But if you can’t find a place to break things, you can honor your anger in other ways. Tell a friend your anger story. Write it down. Collage an image of it. Give it a great big seat of honor on your mantelpiece. I promise it will help.

2) Find the Primary Emotion. Once when I was very angry, a friend told me “anger is a secondary emotion.” At the time, I wanted to throw something hard at his head. But later I realized how helpful this advice was. Anger is indeed real – but it is also a cloaking device. The red hot heat of anger hides other more primary emotions behind its flashy showmanship. When I am angry, and I’ve already ranted and raged in some plate breaking sort of way, I then complete the dealing-with-anger practice. I sit down, usually with a pen and a notebook. I close my eyes. I thank my anger for being an early warning system. Then I ask it to step aside so I can see what is behind it. (Hurt feelings? Not feeling listened to? Disappointment?) Then I get to work on paying attention to that emotion. It works every time.

To Every Season, Change, Change, Change
When I was in my twenties I spent a few weeks at JPUSA—a commune in the poorest part of Chicago. JPUSA had been around since the era of the Jesus Freaks. I was in awe. These people had lived common purse, in families of choice, at poverty level for decades. That was the kind of community I longed for – one rooted in service and place—one with longevity.

What I did not understand was that Soultribes exist for a season. They serve a certain purpose for a certain time. And while some like JPUSA go on for a long time, the reality is their membership is in constant flux. People come and go. Relationships change. Goals alter. And you know what? That’s how it’s meant to be.

Sometimes it’s that the group dynamic which changes, and what you started with morphs into something strange and unfamiliar. Sometimes you change and what once fit and supported you no longer serves you well. When that happens there are three things I find helpful

1) Make a Good Ending. If a group blows up in a mess of bad feelings, this may not be possible. But if you are attentive to the seasonal shifts in yourself and in your group, you can take your leave in a way that creates shalom rather than illness. To make a good ending: give plenty of notice; carve out some time with the tribe to remember what you’ve done together; express thanksgiving to the people you shared so much life with. This can be both incredibly restorative, and emotionally draining—but it’s worth it.

2. Make space for sadness. Leaving your Soultribe often brings about a sense of sadness and loss. Grieving takes time, comes in cycles, and needs you to honor it. One of my favorite tricks for dealing with this process is a shrine for sadness. The simplest version is to clear a space on your window sill (I like to give the process sunlight and fresh air), find a pretty bowl, and gather some pebbles. Every time you remember something sad, or recall something you miss about your community, put a stone in the bowl. What this communicates to your soul is: this is real, this is what you are supposed to feel, there is a space for this sadness.

3) Memorialize The Real. Sometimes when a community closes you can get thrown into a cycle of self-doubt. Was it really as good as you remembered? Were you ever really friends? Had it actually ever fed you? Because we humans are complicated, any tribe we build is a mixed bag. But it’s rare that something you’ve lived in has been a complete bust. Don’t let your gremlins tell you otherwise! Find a way to memorialize the good about your lost tribe. Write a list of true things on a long coil of paper. Make a slide show of your photographs from that era. Read your journal from the time you spent with them. These things will help you remember The Real, and embody the message that while your tribe was not permanent, it was valuable and treasured.

What Soultribe have you left behind? What did you experience? How did you take your leave? What tricks do you have to help you mourn, remember, and celebrate?

Posted in Soulcare
Tags: Grief/Mourning, shrines, Soultribes |

Welcome to 2009, The Year of the Soultribe! Follow all the related posts by clicking “soultribe” in my tag cloud, or following me on Twitter, where I’ll announce new posts.

A few weeks ago Kazari sent in a question for Advice Girl. Kazari likes the idea of a Dreamboarding Circle, and she dug reading up on our soulcare community, Monkfish Abbey, back in the States. In the end her question boiled down to this:

So I guess the question that I have is, where can I find people like you in real life? Or, how do I go about helping such a community to grow in my own house?

Or, more basically, what do I do with this spiritual crisis I grew all by myself? I feel like I need a community to help sort it all out.

This is not the first time I’ve been asked this. It happens quite often. Even more often people write to me about how badly their church fits them, or how worn down they are from trying to find their spiritual “place.” Most of the time those folks resign themselves to one of two things: leaving, or staying somewhere that is a very poor fit – somewhere that pinches their toes, leaves blisters on their heels and keep them from reaching the mountain top because, damn it, their feet hurt too bad to climb on up there!

Soulsiblings, this is the year to build our tribes. No more wandering about on our own, or cramming ourselves into institution and ideologies that no longer fit. This, my friends, is not for us. It’s time to move on – or perhaps more precisely it’s time to move in: to move in to the territory that is truly our own, to put some holes in the wall and hang up our oil paintings, to stick pictures on the fridge. It’s time to make our souls at home.

In the upcoming weeks and months, I will be writing posts that in one way or another have to deal with forming your Soultribe. Grant it, they might be only tangentially related, and of course there will be rabbit trails along the way. But over all, this will be the theme.

So here’s your first assignment: make space for your tribe. Rites and rituals are powerful because they take an abstract idea and make it physical. When you can see, touch, smell, hear or taste your dream, it becomes solid, it becomes real. So make a physical space in your home for your Soultribe. How? Here are two suggestsions

Vest your space. Do something once each week, every week, for at least one month that communicates welcome and gathering to you. Maybe you stack the magazines and fluff the pillows every Monday. Maybe you bake a loaf of bread on Friday night. Perhaps you replace all the candles and light up the room on Sunday.

In liturgical traditions, before a priestess officiates at a service, she dons the robes and stoles of her office. This is called putting on her vestments. When you prepare a space for a holy purpose you vest your space – you prepare the space so that something sacred can get born. What very simple thing could you do as a one-month experiment in vesting your space?

Send an Invitation. Nothing anchors me into a new reality like building a shrine. I’ve made them to quiet my demons, to honor my anger, and to let go of my burdens. Most recently I made one as an invitation to my Soultribe. It consists of a dollhouse chair, a tea light, and my December dreamboard. It took about ten minutes. Well, a couple days of musing about it, then ten minutes to set it up. It’s on the window sill behind my desk and every time I sit down at my computer, I light the candle and as I blow out the match I see that breath as a whisper of welcome. I’m making space for whoever The Muse or The Universe wants to bring my way. (I’m so curious to see what happens!) What object symbolize tribe to you? What things communicate welcome and belonging? Where can you gather them to indicate your openness to the in-gathering that is to come?

What will you do to make space for your Soultribe? Let us know in the comments and put a picture up at our Soulshrine Flickr group.

Posted in Soulcare
Tags: Leaving Church, shrines, Soulcare, Soultribes |

‘’she was not at all happy that Blythe had allowed the gremlins to propigate…”

It’s almost a new year and I feel all prickly with happy anticipation. As my soulsister Jen Lemen always says, “Something hopeful this way comes.” To paraphrase Harry Met Sally, “She’s right, she’s right, I know she’s right”….and isn’t it about time?

So here’s what I think my soulsiblings: if we are going to build tribes, launch book projects, fill our portfolios, have babies, beackon the lovely, and just generally make space to get things born, we’d better get ready. And for me, the number one thing I need to do to get ready is to get my Gremlins to QUIET THE FUCK DOWN!

You probably need that too, right? What’s that you say? What are Gremlins? WHAT ARE GREMLINS?! Oh, you SO need to know this terminology. Sit down, sistah.

“Gremlin” is the term coined in Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carson. It’s a way of describing the little voices in your head that tell you untrue things. This American Life did a great piece on Gremlins called The Devil In Me. In the second act Nancy Updike asks people what the little voice inside their heads is telling them. The answers are at turns tragic, stunning, and most of all, utterly familiar. Go ahead and have a listen. We’ll wait…

Are you back? Did you hear your own Gremlins in there? I know I did.

When my life coach, Jena Strong, first suggested that I started working with my Gremlins, I wanted to throw the book at her head. I couldn’t pin my Gremlins down long enough to find out if they had girl parts or boy parts; I couldn’t read their name tags; and doggonit, they were LEGION! My Gremlins? They were very, VERY noisy.

Then Jen suggested that I take all the voices in my head and make hash marks. In any given day how many times did my Gremlins say something nice to me, and how many times did they say something negative? I tried this. After 48 hours I did not have one single hash mark in the positive column. The negative column on the other hand was quite lively.

Jen said that since my Gremlins were so very busy, maybe I should build them somewhere to go after work. After all, they did have my best intentions at heart. They were trying to protect me – to keep me from doing anything scary, or potentially painful, or too awfully adventuresome. So maybe I should give them a nice shag carpet and, in the words of Jena “sit them down and pour them a stiff drink already.”

So I did. I made them a crash pad in the charming urban-decay style. Wall paper, gilt mirrors, and battery operated twinkly lights…I spared no expense. As I worked on this mansion for the little demons, my un-namable Gremlins began to take dimension and shape. They became less ethereal, and more manageable. Soon the legion was happily ensconced in a pretty little Gremlin dollhouse.

Now that I was a full five feet taller than they were, I felt empowered. I could totally kick their butts. Like Jen says, if they misbehave I could just send them to paperdoll Gitmo.

I rapidly discovered I was not at all pleased that Gremlin Blythe had allowed the other Gremlins to propagate, so I made her put everybody on a neat little leash. The next step was to let the Gremlins take ownership of their own messages, so they didn’t rattle around in my busy little mind. I’ve always adored those little slips of paper that come in fortune cookies, so I cut a whole stack of them and put them next to a tin in the Gremlin dollhouse. Here are just some of the messages that filled that tin up in the first few hours:

“Where you are is not good enough.”
“You never get enough done.”
“Your passions aren’t strong enough.”
“You can’t climb out of this confusion.”
“You never finish anything.”
“WHIMP.”

Now, keep in mind that I have been writing, reading, and carrying around affirmations to counter these messages for weeks. But something about writing them down in their negative, shitty versions was totally empowering. Now they belonged not to me, but to this third person – the Gremlins. They weren’t mine to have and to hold, and they weren’t mine to carry. Now Blythe and her crew could tuck them away on their bookshelf and keep them dusted and alphabetized. Not. My. Problem.

I cannot tell you strongly enough how much of a breakthrough this has been for me. My noisy Gremlins are much quieter these days, and when they do start getting chatty I act like a staff writer from the Evening Post—I just make the report. The quote gets shorthaneded onto a slip of paper and tucked into their dollhouse. End of story.

Since the Gremlin Dollhouse had debuted on my shelf of shrines, it has captured several pairs of eyes. Catie has one now—a whole Gremlin village—and Mabes has worked up a version that looks a like a set from Skins. …What about you? Do you need a place to put the voices in your head? Do your naysaying demons need a crash pad? Start gathering images and items that seem Gremlin-ish to you, and see if you can make a place for that negative self talk to take a load off for awhile. This–this silly game of cut, color and paste–thiscould be your breakthrough for a brand New Year.

What are your Gremlin’s name? Do they have a favorite color/outfit/theme song? Let’s get in charge of these whippersnappers! Talk to us in the comments or send us a picture in our Gremlin Dollhouse Flickr group.

Posted in Crazy Tamers, Soulcare
Tags: Crazy Tamers, gremlins, shrines, Soulcare |

This month’s dreamboard was hard won. First I was in great pain and unable to create. Then I was lost in a chorus of whispers in which no clear voice could be heard. But eventually, when I got still enough long enough, I heard one of the song my heart is singing to me now. The verses are not yet clear, but the chorus is “tribe, tribe, tribe.”

Jen says, I can be honest about what I know now. And what I know now is that is need my soulsisters –or mabye my soulsibilings. I need them around me all the time, sending me messages of hope and speaking affirmation in my ears. I feel sheepish about it — this constant need for feedback and assistance and the exchange of ideas. But it’s okay to do things and get support at the same time, rights? As Jena says, is it functional? Because if it is, then why fight it?

It is functional for me, this communal way of life, the ebb and flow, the give and take. Even in the midst of my love of the solitary, I also need this chorus of voices. So I’m trying to listen to my own internal voice of authority and no matter what the experts say about rugged individualism, I’m recognizing that I need a hand to hold.

This month when Suzie asked The Universe what she had in store for me, she pulled the Nine of Cups not once, but twice. Two wishes for me! For the longest time I couldn’t decide what to wish for. I knew one wish had to be “Body”– for my health, for my pain, for the way I see my physical self. But the other one remained elusive. I got stuck in that loop of endless decision-making to which I am so prone. What if I made the wrong choice? What if I spoke the wrong word into being, then regreted wasting my wish?

I believe, even on my most doubtful days, that nothing is ever wasted. Or at least, I try to believe. (“Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”) So whatever wish I make must be right, right?. And like Jaime says, if you move towards something and you don’t feel like backpeddling as fast as you can, move closer. So this is the word that has settled into my tongue, and I speak it into exisitence. “Tribe.”

Who do you need in your tribe? Truth tellers? Cultivators? Dreamers? Cuddlers? Champions? Warriors? Withmates? All of the above? Do tell…

Posted in Soulcare, Soulstories
Tags: dreamboards, jena strong, shrines, Soulcare, Soulstories |

tiny offerings for our fall shrine

In Seattle our soulcare community, Monkfish Abbey, made a lovely shrine together. It started as an experiment in creating some sort of sacred center that everyone in our circle could feel connected to — something that would celebrate all of our varied beliefs. Neil made it out of a dresser drawer and over the years we filled it with flowers, leaves, stones, notes, treasures, photos, collages, incense and candles. My favorite way to interact with the shrine was to clean it out and freshen it up each season with new symbols from the natural world. When we moved, I left our beautiful glowing red shrine back in Seattle. I didn’t know if we’d have a living room big enough to hold it, and it felt as though it belonged to the house and the community more than it belonged to me.

A few months after we arrived in Denmark, someone in the building across the street moved out and left a funny little box on the corner with the rest of the ‘give away’ stack. I rescued it in the hopes of making a new shrine. It moved from one place another in our house, and tried filling it with this and that. But it wasn’t until our Autumn Equinox Chili Fest that it finally came together. (what we do here, recipes here). It is now filled with:

- St. Catherine of Alexandria’s card from last year’s zine
- an incense burner Emily and Iz brought back from Greece
- a pretty glass jar from Helene, and another from Yan, Kim, and Mia (a blended Danish/Chinese family)
-apples and berries from dear Barbra and Ron, ex-pats from S. Africa (they also brought me a hard-to-find butternut squash!)
-a stone from Sharon and Bruce’s dream trip from France, found at the foot of the Eiffle Tower
-little tags with words of gratitude
- the battery operated lights I bought for the ill-fated Winter Solstice tent of ‘06, now redeemed.

It’s coming together quite well now. Meaning and memories are seeping in. As Iz would say, “Melikesee.”

< How do you create sacred space for you home? What tiny objects are like holy vessels to you? Do tell!