The intimacy of sacred space
The comments on the "Time Travel" post a few days ago indicate that others have felt what I did, returning to my former home, and also felt a keen disconnection and loss when places that were important to them have changed or disappeared. Thinking about my own reactions I realize there was a lot about this last visit that remained unvoiced - even in my own head - and that some of this involves places to which I had a deep or persistent connection but either didn't, or didn't want, to visit.
I think there is a sacredness about certain places in our lives, a sacredness we perhaps don't admit and seldom talk about. More than the obvious corporate or public ones, from places of worship to natural spots that others agree are unique or special, I'm talking about private spots that somehow become "ours" over time. For me, there was my Vermont garden -- which I definitely do not want to visit or even see, now that it belongs to someone else. There was my studio/meditation space, a private room of my own where I meditated, drew and painted, wrote on the walls, thought, cried. There was our bedroom, and spaces in our living area where particularly important conversations took place or memories were formed, sometimes involving people now gone. There was the hilltop where J. and I were married. And there were a few favorite spots on a wooded hillside laced with public walking trails, but those I think I could visit again without feeling any pangs.
Most of the public places I frequented have already changed so much - and so much for the worse - over the three decades of suburbanization during which I lived there, that the grief I felt is mostly gone now.
It's odd for me to realize how much of the sacredness of a particular place has to do with pilgrimage - it needs to be a place to which I've returned again and again - and how it can be very large: a view across hills toward larger mountains, for instance; or very small: a corner of a room, or a shelf holding particular, chosen objects that I've looked at for years during meditation or deep thought. Over time, the place we visit or create becomes, somehow, consecrated by those thoughts and our own presence, so that if it were destroyed we would feel something had been not merely destroyed but desecrated. These feelings can be so intimate, so private, and so subterranean that we barely admit them even to ourselves. Why? Because what we bring to those spaces is the deepest part of ourselves, the part that I think is inextricably intertwined - even indistingishable- from the divine. Some say this is where they meet God; some don't use that language. I would call them liminal spaces where the borders between holiness and ordinariness are the most porous, the most blurry. At the most mystic level, this is where we can no longer tell where "we" end and "the holy" begins.
Perhaps the reluctance to return to our "old" places is because we fear desecration, loss, and grief, and we don't want to be caught in these feelings by others (who don't feel the same way at all) because the emotions are so very private. We may even know (also, perhaps, without saying so aloud) that we experience other people's lack of understanding about these emotions as another kind of desecration, too.
