I forgot to worship for a long time. I became enamored with technology and media, so the rituals I used to perform fell by the wayside. I became too secular and human and forgot that I am magical and belong in the cathedral of trees.
The word ” altar” derives from Latin and means a burning place. Whether you are burning incense or an animal offering, the smoke must go to heaven.
Altars can be out in plain sight, and one might not know that worship is happening. I walked along the cliff walk in Newport the other day, and both sides of the path were lined densely with fully bloomed daffodils. These are offerings.
El Santuario de Chimayó is a church in New Mexico that people visit because they think the dirt can heal. When I had cancer, someone gave me a small container of dirt to help me heal. The church walls are scattered with crutches, wheelchairs, and other proof of healed sick.
There are places deep in the woods where a copse of trees forms a sacred place. I used to sit in a grove of cedars and hear the rain fall around me. There was something hypnotic about how the rain would fall through the surrounding alder trees.
We used to go on pilgrimages to shrines and cathedrals and worship at altars, but now we have created them in our homes and are no longer willing to make the journey.
When I was in college in Eugene, I had a roommate who built an altar. He was into Russian and Greek Orthodox Christianity. I loved Eastern saints and their icons.
I noticed that my home office looks more like an altar, and I am at its icons more than at the altar I made for my worship. But it costs money to be alive and worship.
I grew up reading the quests of the knights of the Round Table, and I dreamt of being the knights out in the wilds, but now I relate to the hermits living alone at the shrines where the knights rest.
I found a spot on a creek not that far away from my apartment where I sit on a rock in the middle of the creek with my feet in the cold flowing stream and watch the wind move the canopy of the cathedral. I feel the spirits dance among the beams of sunlight that light up butterflies dancing among the buttercups. My dog watches for deer who are looking for a place to drink from the hillside above. Instead of stained glass windows depicting a story, I see the light reflected from the creek on the rocks shimmer.
A bus stop is a roadside shrine.
I walked among the gravestones near me and saw the rocks placed on them. When we return to grieve, we have to leave a part of ourselves.
My wife and I used to go to a beach in Oregon, where we had to walk down a flight of wooden stairs to look for agates. The whole beach was a cathedral, and instead of lighting candles, we would wait until there was a sea storm, which would bring beautiful smooth stones to take and place on our altars at home.
I used to leave the trail in the woods and force myself through the impenetrable underbrush to find secret shrines and altars deep in the woods. I would discover bones, antlers, and soft mossy beds under giant trees. I could smell the sunbaked pine needles, and I would know I was smelling a goddess.
When I was young, in Portland, Oregon, there was a small window and a machine that looked like a vending machine. It was the 24-hour Church of Elvis. You could get married there, and I did several times with several of my friends. When that shrine finally disappeared, there was little to no spirit left in that city.
There is an apartment complex where I grew up, whose address was 2121. When I was a teenager, my friends and I would drunkenly change it to 2112 in honor of the Rush album. This was to stop at a roadside shrine and practice a ritual at the altar.
Anytime I see a big oak tree, I think I know a secret that others don’t know.
I remember being in East Africa and seeing little roadside shrines to gods I knew and gods I didn’t know.
Ever since I heard the song “Alice’s Restaurant” by Arlo Guthrie, I’ve wanted to live in a church. The church wouldn’t be a church anymore, but a shrine where people could find peace and tranquility. God isn’t needed for that.