Small personal shrines

A few days ago I noticed a young woman sitting near the City Farm gardens at the Loyola Campus of Concordia University, so today, out of curiosity, I walked where she had been sitting. I am always interested in people's expressions of spirituality, especially personal expressions not associated with any organized religion. Going back millennia people have made little shrines, memorials to dead animals, almost paganistic collections of feathers, shells, broken glass, weathered photographs, holy wells, things hanging from trees, Oak trees, Yew trees, or some other private ritual that is the expression of something important to them. Something that lives on in people's souls despite current events. So, I wasn't surprised to find hidden in some overgrown bushes a vase with a flower in it, several white stones, and a Christmas ornament. What does it mean? We'll never know except that it means something to someone.

Poetry, D.H. Lawrence, & the Apocalypse

D.H. Lawrence writes the following in Apocalypse:

To get at the Apocalypse we have to appreciate the mental working of the pagan thinker or poet – pagan thinkers were necessarily poets – who starts with an image, sets the image in motion, and then takes up another image. The old Greeks were very fine image-thinkers, as the myths prove. Their images were wonderfully natural and harmonious. They followed the logic of action rather than of reason, and they had no moral axe to grind. But still they are nearer to us than the Orientals, whose image-thinking often followed no plan whatsoever, not even the sequence of action. We can see it in some of the Psalms, the flitting from image to image with no essential connections at all, but just the curious image-association. The Oriental loved that.

To appreciate the pagan manner of thought we have to drop our own manner of on-and-off-and-on, from a start to a finish, and allow the mind to move in cycles, or to flit here and there over a cluster of images. Our idea of time as a continuity in an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly. The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movement upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind, at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we have to trail wearily on over another ridge.

The old method of the Apocalypse is to set forth the image, make a world, and then suddenly depart from this world in a cycle of time and movement and event, an epos; and then return again to a world not quite like the original one, but on another level. The ‘world’ is established on twelve: the number twelve is basic for an established cosmos. And the cycles move in sevens.

            --From Apocalypse, by D.H. Laurence, Penguin Books, 1974, p. 54-55