home, exile, charnal grounds & infinity pools
Our homes are mirrors of ourselves. They reflect our interests, our beliefs, our hesitations, our spirit and our passion. They tell a story about how we feel about ourselves and the world around us. A home is more than a place where you can lay your head and seek comfort with the elements. It is a place where you can interface with the universe. It is a crossing point in time and space that can attract energy or repel energy.
You home can be a place of renewal and hope. It can be a sanctuary withing which you can retreat and recharge during the changing times, an oasis of peace amidst turmoil. Homes can be places of healing and regeneration. Not only can your home help to strengthen and heal you, but your home can be a template of harmony within which you and all who enter can be invited to step up to a higher level of spiritual frequency.
Denise Linn, "Home as Being," Sacred Space, 1.
I was thinking about housing foreclosures and the whole sub-prime ripple effect on the lives of people in this country. If you strip someone of home, they lose – unless they can against all odds reestablish it within themselves, a tall order – that place of renewal and hope. Translate the mortgage crisis into a spiritual crisis. Exile. Being on the run. No longer being safe in your own space – gypsies, jews preceding and up to the very end of WWII, Palestinians today. Iraqis. The money game of now you have it now you don't, or as tom waits says "the large print giveth and the fine print taketh away." Tibetans in exile. Camps of homeless exiles in Africa. The common denominator is the stripping of this spiritual base from the people on the part of those in power, in an effort to continue only chaos, defocus us from Spirit, Source Energy (Abraham), the Great Central Sun (Arcturian). These efforts to deracinate and exile are ultimately futile, but short term the graph of suffering spikes even as the Wall Street charts plummet. Change is coming faster than those in power can imagine in their wildest dreams.
I like in the vajrayana how certain tantric practices direct us to the "charnal grounds." These too are important places – liminal zones where the ego must face its demons and overcome. The practice of Chö, invented by Machik Lapdrön, encourages the "cutting" of comfort even with owning a body; the practice takes place traditionally in charnal grounds. We see young goth kids hang out in graveyards. While they are certainly romancing death, sorrow and a kind of vampiric sexuality, they are also perhaps honoring the dead and practicing a liminal spirituality not much honored in this country. In a way, goths are more dark hippies than ethereal punks.
It is easy for me to think: Well, I like five star hotels, infinity pools and labyrinthian mansions made by cross-breeding Frank Lloyd Wright, Gaudi, Hundertwasser and Escher. I would rather sit in first class in an airplane – but have I ever done so? Does it really matter? Physical spaces that mold into the earth rather than try to dominate it are more impressive to me. The Hobbits had it right. The Balinese have it right; their brand of feng shui, named bagua, is a powerful cosmic system of respect for the land and the spirits translated into living spaces. Have you ever wondered why many prefer macs today over windows? It's the space; the same rules that apply to physical space apply to virtual space. Clutter breeds neurosis; decluttering engenders peace of mind.




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