To Build a Temple

It was a midsummer’s day in 2012 when my yurt was first erected amongst Ash, Hazel and Chestnut on a wooden platform I had affectionately called the ‘Badger’s dancefloor’. I had been living in a tent in the meadow next to the woods for a few months, preparing the ground for the yurt’s arrival and deepening my intimacy with this place that was becoming my home. There was a large set of badger’s that lived on an Oak-covered mound, who I liked to imagine snuck out under the moon to dance in her sliver light - the keeper’s of the medicine roots, invoking the moon.

Before the platform was built, I made a bundle of prayers that I buried in the fertile soil at the centre of where the yurt was to stand. There were herbs, ash, seeds and small pieces of ancient yew I had gathered from various elders I was befriending at the time. I invited them to form a council here and bless this site as holy ground.

For my first proper home was also to be my first temple. A place of sanctuary and refuge to attend the Sacred and a space to facilitate my own transformation and evolution. What I didn’t know then was that this temple would also become my son’s first home, and later, a space where I would facilitate numerous ceremonies and midwife many souls across thresholds.

When I lived in Japan as a teenager, I was often drawn to the Shinto temples that stood in Tokyo’s parks or the wild shrines on mountain paths. These ‘Homes for the Holy’ were generous reminders of the ways humans can interact and commune with the spirit realm; to feed that which feeds us. When crossing the threshold in to a temple, I remember feeling time fall away and the qualities of presence, reverence and awe being invoked.

A temple is defined by purpose and intention, as a place where we remember how to relate to the unseen forces that animate life and cultivate the awareness that we are participating in something larger than our own narrative. This awareness fosters a sense of devotion - not necessarily to a doctrine or a named deity, but to the act of tending. Tending the fire. Tending the silence. Tending beauty. Tending the quality of presence we bring into the space.

It was by visiting temples that I witnessed how others tended the Sacred through their acts of devotion - lighting incense, kneeling before an altar, quietening and becoming still, listening, praying, weeping. The swirling smoke and candle flames saturated my soul like nectar to a bee. I felt drunk on the holy and it was intoxicating.