Sacred Space

Self-Reflection

Scared places

I am really connected to places in nature; my spirituality is closely intertwined with it. In the process of taking the photos and creating the power-point, two very different trains of thought about nature, spirituality, and geography and how they are connected came into my mind. Initially, I connected with the material in superficial way; I thought I would just take pictures of places and things that I consider beautiful and sacred and create a display and that would be all there was to it.

At one level, that is what I did; however, during the creation process an email conversation with a former professor took my thoughts to environmentalism and spirituality. We were discussing construction dumping in environments that are considered “disposable environments” (my term) such as the desert which is thought to have little intrinsic or aesthetic value; I began to feel a real sense of panic about the disappearing landscape. If my spirituality is tied to the environment so firmly, what happens to my sense of the sacred if the symbols start becoming less accessible? Do I stop feeling spiritual? Do I somehow just shift my focus? Can that even be done easily?

These questions gave me serious pause. I had to reassess whether my spirituality was coming from my interior self or induced by outside stimuli. The more I thought about it the more I became convinced that I could feel a sense of connectedness regardless of where I am—inside or outside. Do I feel the same sense of wonder that sun shining on green grass can create within me in my office? Not as viscerally but the memory can bring a semblance of it to my day. I still believe that some places can facilitate a sense of the sacred more readily than others, but this is likely to be different for everyone. For me, it is necessary to have the splendor of beautiful natural settings to feel fully connected the universe, my fellow beings, and myself. I also believe that there are natural settings in which the veil between the sacred or universe and humans is thinner or more permeable.

However, this exercise has made me see that my sense of the spiritual needs to be more fully incorporated into my being rather than depending on the places I find myself in or those I deliberately take myself to. While I did not have a crisis of faith, I have to take a look at whether I am truly coming from a spiritual place within me to these places of beauty or if I am lazily waiting for the place to induce the feeling of the sacred in me. Questions are good, and I am happy that I have to look at issues that I had not thought about before. Certainty seems desirable on face value but I wonder……