in sanctuary

I have just come back from visiting Sarah to help her with The Entertainment of Jaylen on such a rainy day (mmmmm, rain), and when she left to deliver him to Joshua she gave me a Silvia Hartmann recording to listen to on her i-pod. Silvia Hartmann is the goddess of Project Sanctuary which is, to my mind, nothing short of genius. You can find more information about it here.

For all I have learnt or gained from Project Sanctuary I only actually did it for a few days or weeks when I first learnt about it several years ago, and haven’t been back since. But this recording talks you through going to sanctuary and creating the environment and checking it out. I went through the process to see if my sanctuary would be a different place to the one I had all those years ago.

No, same place. Some minor variations in design. You have to keep in mind that I am an architect so it’s natural for me to design my environment in my mind, and I had worked out my answers to a lot of the questions long before the exercise began. You’d think that would mean I’m suffering from too much mind interference for success, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

So it’s like you are, in your imagination, in a place. So far it has no features. First, what is the season of the year? Then, what time of day? How warm or cold is it? Then bring some landscape features into it. Is there a slope? Is there grass, are there trees, rocks, cliffs, flowers? Is there sea, a river, a fountain? It’s your garden, make it yours, paint it with your brush. And then find your dwelling - a small and simple one for now, it might develop more rooms or features later. For now it is about materials, textures and colours, or the cosiness or expansiveness of the spaces.

For me it was instantly autumn (which it is in real life, wooohooo!), one of those gusty evenings you get in autumn when you really know the season has changed, the colour of the light has changed, everything is deeper and richer. And it was instantly my real-life property in the mountains, which is where it was before, and I was standing on the deck with the still-warm, gusty wind bending the huge mountain grey gums above me. The deck was attached to a house which had one room up and one down, and upstairs had a balcony coming out from one corner hanging over the town. The deck had french doors (as we call them in Melbourne, a french window elswhere) onto the farmhouse kitchen. It was a building I had previously designed but with many adjustments that I ‘discovered’ rather than created.

Then she suggests a place to meet our ‘emissary’ which is some kind and helpful ‘person’ or being of any kind who might be a sounding board, guide, companion or whatever we may want to spur the action along. I didn’t want my emissary to be the same as it was last time because guess who it was. Jesus. I’m not actually a christian, but culturally I am, and we were a church-going family, and I embraced the idea with more enthusiasm as a teenager, so I guess he’s an appropriate symbol to me. He seemed appropriate last time, especially as he had the face of Viggo Mortensen, but by now I think of him as wanting to be left alone. ‘Stop hangin’ off my robes guys, for goodness’ sake! It’s been 2000 years already. I want to move on to new and different things!’

Anyway, apparently he still wants to be my emissary. I’ll discuss it with him when I have time and possibly interview a few more candidates, but I had to go with the flow while Silvia was continuing to talk. Then she said to find a wishing well in sanctuary with a bowl of wishing coins on the coping. I just couldn’t find the right place for my wishing well, worried about young children falling in and other such architectural concerns, but by now she had me holding a coin, making a wish and tossing it to the wish fairies and elves who lived in the well. ‘I wish for . . .’ I delved for my deepest desire, ‘Passion.’ And I threw.

Passion, huh. Who knew?