~~ cleansing ~~ *

~~ cleansing ~~

bowl of sea-salt water (Salt water and seawater is used in cleansing rituals all over the world. In my own Jewish heritage salt water is also used as a commemoration of grieving, in the Pesach Seder.) 
quartz crystal sphere placed in the water 
hawk feather 

Jeanne Hewell-Chambers:

this is so tender and so profound. i am learning so much from you and your lovely altars, Karen Wohl. can i ask what the quartz sphere in the water signifies? i love quarts. have it all over the place – especially near electronic devices.

Karen Wohl:

Jeanne you may absolutely ask any question you like, about my altars. 🙂

I may not always have a totally cogent response, though, because sometimes it’s a pretty intuitive decision about what I include in the altar.

In the case of the quartz sphere, I don’t have a totally cogent response. Today’s altar was fairly reactive, one where I had been kind of wandering through my day with a funny kind of aimless mood-flavor to it. When I thought about how to express my mood with an altar, what came up was not wholly articulable but it was pretty well captured by my comments about saltwater as cleansing, and also as tears (commemoration of grieving). I was also doing some housecleaning today. So the altar started with my knowing I wanted something with salt water.

I love that black bowl and haven’t used it recently, so then I thought, oh, yeah, I’ll put the salt water in that black bowl. But then it was like there was something missing. And I kind of felt like I wanted to put some kind of focus in the center of the water. I first thought about a tealight in a glass candleholder, in the center of the saltwater, but somehow that didn’t feel right, I can’t say why not, it just didn’t belong.

That quartz sphere had found its way into my knitting bag a long time ago, for a random reason I have since forgotten, but I left it there because I liked the whimsy of it being there along with the random accoutrements of my crochet hook (used in picking up any dropped stitches) and stitch holders and pocket scissors, etc. I hadn’t done any knitting in a long time, but I started a new project not long ago, and so re-found my quartz sphere. And so when I was thinking what was it that belonged in the center of the bowl, I thought of the quartz sphere, and when I did, I realized that what belonged in the center of the bowl of water was something about clarity in particular. That it was *clarity*, that was at the heart of today’s altar, and that was why I wanted the sphere there. I could have named the altar “clarity”, but it was still that evanescent mood and the sense of cleansing and sadness that the saltwater captured, that felt most salient.

It was particularly lovely and perfect, that the photo captured the light of the flash, in the quartz, like that.