Imagine you need some time to think and be by yourself. You find yourself walking to a familiar spot. The air feels different here, thicker than usual as it settles around you. You stop, plant your feet, and close your eyes. The rest of the world spins madly, but this space holds you. Perhaps it vibrates with the memories of other places and other days. Perhaps it provides views that are visions of your future. Its sounds and atmosphere comfort you with something like the blanket of your soul.
I’ve been seeking out sacred spaces for the summer solstice. The longest day urged me to get outside, even if I was tired from a difficult day at work and wasn’t in the mood. I happen to have just finished The Artist’s Way, which I started working through around the spring equinox, and although I still like to think of myself as a hardened cynic at heart, the idea of sometimes trusting to the universe has crept into my psyche. The day forced me to consider walking as a spiritual practice, even though this makes me uncomfortable. This annual pause - this expansive breath in before the days start to exhale again - seemed a good time to reflect a little, and to be reminded that I’m part of the natural world, not just passing through it.
I have had many sacred spaces over the years, gradually discovering them in each place I lived. Spaces I could go to recognise myself and look afresh at the world. Sometimes they have been seemingly banal, like a window seat in a quiet café. Sometimes they have been more obviously profound: a hillside bench with a view of a gleaming city; a shady corner of a Victorian park; a tree on the edge of a field with roots formed like a throne.
My earliest sacred space may well have been the gap between our old shed and the garden fence, a spider-filled cavity only I could squeeze into, and as magical as any fantastical realm. There I could tell stories and become anyone or anything I wanted to be – a champion tennis player or one of the daffodil queens who lived in the flowerbeds nearby. Later, some of my artist’s playfulness may have disappeared, but a sense of multiplicity remained. As a young graduate, I spent a year or so travelling between Birmingham and Oxford, living a divided life, enacting different identities. My early-morning walk to New Street railway station involved crossing a pedestrian bridge over the construction works for the new Bull Ring shopping centre. The old centre had been demolished and for several wintery months the site was just a crater, huge and mysterious, often filled with rising fog. I would spend a few minutes on the bridge peering into the darkness, readying myself for the day. Something about the raw dug-up ground pleased me. I was sad when the building itself started to emerge from the depths and take shape.
I am still most at home in liminal, inbetween places, but now my sacred spaces are more homely. For this year’s summer solstice, the cats joined me as friendly familiars on a walk around the local fields. We took in the damp smells of hedgerow, made our way past hogweed and the magical pyramidical orchids. Voices of midsummer drinkers drifted over from the pub, mingling with the chatter of the reed warbler. After the sun disappeared, I made my way back to the garden and climbed into the treehouse, writing myself beyond the disappointments of the day, allowing dusk to gather around me.
(This final image is a brilliantly prescient vision of me in my current sacred space by the fabulous and talented Wallis Eates - from a project we worked on a few years back)
Another lovely piece, Als. Thanks for taking us to some of your sacred spaces through your writing.