This is one of my altars. Everything on it has deep meaning to me — the shells, storyteller dolls, my grandmother’s teacup, nesting dolls, images of the Goddess. I realized a while ago that, like most women, I had really been making altars all my life, I just didn’t realize it. I made my very first altar, when I was 11 years old, atop my speckled nightstand — that funny pink-and-brownish speckly wood, you have to be at least 50 to remember that! — where I placed an embroidered cloth, a Bible, and a photo of Jesus holding a lamb in one hand and a staff in the other. I didn’t call it an altar, of course. I thought of altars as something that existed only in church, something priests or duly recognized and officially authorized religious people had to set up. My altars weren’t “real” like that, I didn’t think. Sort of like my life wasn’t “real,” like that.
Feminism and women’s spirituality gave me words and language to describe the altars I have always made all of my life, as well as for the deep longings my altars have both represented and honored. In religion, the sacred was always somehow external to me as a woman. It resided in what was male or male-authorized, male-written, male-proscribed. Feminism, women’s spirituality, freed me to recognize my own life, and all women’s lives, our longings, our values, as sacred, too and to honor my newfound freedom with altars created consciously and intentionally.
Heart
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