Marking Sacred Space With Sage Smudging

Part of living life as art is honoring the sacred in the moment.

One of the things I wanted to do to usher out the old and welcome in the new year was to conduct a ritual often used by the American Indians, burning a wand of wild sage leaves over a bowl of sand so that the herb torch formed a smoking ember with which I could clear and mark sacred space in my home and work areas.

Preparation for this ritual which we conducted New Year's Eve were integrated into the Christmas vacation where we drove along the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu's Zuma Beach, a place I love because it is a real beach as nature intended, and often deserted save for the season's characters and offerings, sea gulls or sand pipers. The day I went, it was empty. The tides had traced ripples into the sand, which like when snow has just fallen, is perfect, and untouched by human footprints. We had tarried, but this had worked in our favor as the sun was setting, like a glowing orange ember on the horizon, setting the sky on fire.

I had brought a container with me, a plastic jar with a lid, to gather sand from the seashore to take back with me for this ritual of purification and renewal. Ritual is important. It is part of celebration, part of healing, part of creating. In an interview in 1984, the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham said, "Spring may be the death of winter, but it is also a rebirth. Right now, the tulips are coming up in the garden outside - they are about three inches high. There is a progression, and ritual is necessary to life - if an animal does not have it, some other animal kills it."

We can be so careless in our haste, in our haste to acquire, to move foreward, to assimilate, that we do not pause and walk with clearness. We forget that we must cleanse as well as take in, that we must slow down and let go, so that the new can be welcomed in. In this spirit, I collected sand and bought sage gathered by native Americans in Baja, California who have observed ritual for many generations, the rituals of nature and the seasons.

On New Year's Eve this year, we passed up the loud and the brash. We had champagne, yes, but we turned out the lights as the last half hour of the year seemed to be racing past like sand through an hourglass. We lit the sage and held it over a bowl filled with sand to catch the errant embers that would threaten fabric and carpets, and painted the air with the scented smoke of the sage wand. We prayed or consiously intentioned that the space would be cleared and blessed.

We opened the doors so that the smoke could go out, but also so that the old stale energies, pain, grief, arguments, anything that I did not want hanging around at the liminal moment of the final passing of 2006 and the entrance of 2007 could be released, and so it was. And so it is.

That evening also gave birth to the beginning of this blog, something that is like a dynamic letter sent out to the ends of the earth, to friends I have not yet had the pleasure to speak with, but with whom I feel connected to through the Internet human family. This post is like a ripple going out on water, like a message in a bottle, unleashing its contents when it finds you.

My message today is that to live life as art - the spirit of Devi Arts, is to live your life with mindful awareness of it as something sacred, and part of doing that is to mark sacred space. This can and should be done in many creative ways, and I will speak more about this anon.

For now, I share this story, and this idea which you can use at any time that you feel is right, to cleanse your space and make it sacred and pure, a place where you can renew yourself and create, free from the shackles of the past. Let your spirit be your guide.