The Daily Work of Sacred Space

Bill Moyers: You write in “The Mythic Image” about the center of transformation, the idea of a sacred place where the temporal walls may dissolve to reveal a wonder. What does it mean to have a scared place?

Joseph Campbell: This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

It does seem that kindness is the door to happiness, and we would do well to remember that kindness is a graceful affection to another — as well as to one’s self. To provide a still place and time for simply existing — whether it be with a book, a piece of music, or a craft — is one of the most nourishing services we can do for ourselves. And, indeed, this allows us to relieve stress, and thus be of greater service to others.

I think of my own meditation practice. Sitting on the cushion, I rest my weight on my seat, and I feel the slow pull of tension from my groin to my knees. I balance on the cushion, equal parts peaceful and precarious. As my breathe fills my stomach, and my monkey mind begins to rest, the tension in my hips releases, quiet as a silent ripple’s song. I give the tightness to the ground. With stalactite certainty, my knees drip down to the earth. The mono- of my balancing act becomes tri-, and the base of support becomes solid. Relaxed and alert, I am, without doing, meditating.

In this way, the clumsy can become coordinated. Or, in my case, at least more so.

Was it market urgency that drove away the space of the sacred? In sacred acts, It is not even patience that takes place, for patience regards some event in the future. When the sabbath is created in our lives we allow ourselves to simply exist, to be with gentle care. It is in this way that pouring a cup of tea becomes ritual, and in the heaving half-circle steps after a long run that one is deeply alive. Sanskrit, as always, provides an apt term: shamatha, meaning calm abiding, loosely focused, the way the gardener lovingly trims the plant, or the artists brushes paint across the canvas. This is, I think, what we call grace.

There is a tenderness within us that I take to be the seat of the soul. The cup filled by the muse. Within this inside-quiet lies inspiration and possiblity beyond anything yet known; indeed, it is from the unknown inside that the new is created. We venture into uninterpreted space, and, with courage and faith and trust, are able to share our findings: in art, in conversation, in love. This, then, is the beautiful forge of creativity, shamatha awareness transforming the inner to outer.

The only thing holding us back is us. Every barrier, every border, is our own. If we are to grow, we must take full responsibilty for our prejudices: Every “I can’t” is an atrophied “I don’t.” We must face the fear at the bottom of the learning curve. We must not yield to our doubts, if we are to yield to our dreams.

Projects are daunting. They daunt; they are experts at it. The “can’t” chorus sings siren song, but the “can” camp swells with each daily drop in the bucket. The year is young. Plenty of buckets to choose from. So What is your sacred shamatha vessel, and how will you gracefully fill it?