100,000 Shrines

...an essay about building connections in our living moments.

Watercolor collage and photo, Cliff Scholz

There are moments. We say things like: “That was the moment I knew I was falling in love,” or, “That was the moment I knew I wanted to be a professional musician,” or “That was the moment I knew we were going to be friends.”

Not all moments have a wonderful feeling, of course. Someone might say, “That was the moment I felt the car starting to spin out of control,” for example, or: “That was the moment I realized my partner never really respected me.”

There are pivotal moments, moments of “momentous importance.” And there are also moments of mindless distraction, moments of gentle intimacy, moments of extremes of various kinds. And sometimes, a moment that might not seem like a big deal in the moment turns out to be a very big deal in retrospect when we look back and have a moment of reflection.

In a way, it sounds trite: our lives are made up of moments. However, knowing that our experience of living is made up of moments means that we can take an active hand in constructing our lives, moment by moment.

You might want to take a moment to think about that.

It’s been twelve years since the 2012 election cycle. One day in March of that year, I was in my car on the gravel roads that lead out of our neighborhood making the 10-minute drive to my annual eye checkup. I had the car radio on. It being an election year, what I heard on the radio was talk about the upcoming election. I listened for a while and turned it off. Then I started wondering what leadership looks like for me personally, and for all of us in general, and I realized that while picking our leaders does matter, at least in theory, focusing too much on that might make the possibility of each of us expressing leadership as individuals less prominent in our minds. Minutes later, I found myself sitting in my car looking at a piece of neglected ground near the dumpsters in the parking lot behind the optometrist office. I’d just parked and had arrived for my appointment a little early. I saw salt on the asphalt, and dirty, crusty, partly melted snow on the unpaved areas beyond.

Granted, March is often not the prettiest time of year in Michigan. But as I looked out at this place toward the back of what we in this culture call the “property” where chicory and Queen Anne’s lace and tall grasses had made a valiant stand for life toward the end of the previous summer, leaving their dried and withered stalks rising above the snow as testimony to their industry and community service, in a moment it occurred to me that this place might have been very different to the indigenous inhabitants of the land here, say 200 years ago. I thought about how a culture that very consciously draws its sustenance directly from the land on a daily basis might look differently upon such a piece of ground than a culture that sees land primarily as something to be owned, maintained with machines, crossed by roads and automobiles, or built upon. It further occurred to me that, for someone, perhaps someone from those times, the forsaken-looking place next to the dumpster behind the medical office building might have been a special place. It might have been known for its individual character. This place might even have had a name, perhaps one now lost to history. And then, I realized, even now, field mice and other creatures that carry on in close association with the land are almost certainly living lives of unseen but dramatic intensity there, as I looked out on the scene from behind my auto glass.

And then I realized that despite the glass and the fact that I was sitting on a plastic seat in a metal box, I too was alive, right here, right now. I realized that through my imagination and through the felt sense that had drawn my attention to that neglected space, I was having a kind of conversation and perhaps even a form of communion with that piece of the planet. My being there mattered. My seeing it mattered. True, the sun may have been hidden behind patchy clouds on a day when the temperature in Southeastern Michigan would hover just above and below freezing, but it occurred to me that the sun was still shining above the clouds, and that here on earth, I was radiating something in my own way, and that I always am, and that it counts for something. It has to.

All of this followed from the question I’d asked myself after turning off the car radio about what leadership really is, what it looks like, how it feels, and how I and others might better embrace the capacity for leadership. So this entire experience of perception and thought came as a reply. And this, my friends, was the moment when I thought, “Wow, I’m constructing a moment right now. Partly through my own agency and partly in communion with the world beyond the glass, I am on the leading edge of life here. Just being alive means I’m on the leading edge of life. Therefore leadership is built into living. Wow. I matter.” It was kind of a shocking realization.

After my appointment on the way home I stopped by the grocery store, eyes still dilated from the exam, and I recall seeing the faces of store clerks and fellow shoppers in the garish fluorescent light inside. And again, March can be a hard time of year in Michigan and it can wear people down a bit sometimes as winter grinds on after the official first day of spring, but the people I saw reminded me a lot of that neglected piece of land by the dumpster behind the medical office building. I realized that there was something indigenous still alive there, too, deep biological history and life expanding, even now, but in the main I saw something kind of downcast, distracted, and unloved. So I went through the same process I’d experienced earlier while sitting in my car. I realized that like that piece of neglected earth I’d seen an hour or two before, underneath that surface presentation of bereftness, these people were all very likely, in some way or another, beloved too, known and named, everyone making a valiant stand for life. And to that I stood as witness, knowing that my witnessing counted for something, simply because I was there, too.

And what I realized is that just as our lives are constructed of moments, we can more or less consciously build, using time alone, moments that function as points of deep connection, places where we find intimate communion with something that exists both beyond and within ourselves.

Now you might want to hear that something numinous and wonderful happened in the produce section or in the heady atmosphere of scented laundry dryer sheets a few aisles over. And yes, I sort of did have such a moment, or series of moments, just in the witnessing of life and feeling it and drinking it in as I went about my brief stop at the store. But the larger idea that arose from all this was also numinous. Bedazzled by the colors and lights shining into my enlarged pupils and struggling to focus my eyes, my inner perception had taken on something correspondingly big. It felt like a big moment. The whole morning had started to read like a big, momentous moment, which is probably why I remember it pretty clearly even now, more than twelve years later.

The word ‘shrine’ came up in my mind. I started to wonder what the world would be like if every moment were treated as a worthy place to make a sacred offering.

What is a shrine? In essence, a shrine is a structure that encloses a kind of space, a space that in turn opens to something beyond that space. At least, that’s what I see going on. Pilgrims visit shrines and open to the space that the shrine helps them connect with. Throughout the ages people have built shrines of stone or wood, carved niches into walls for this purpose, or created mesas and prayer bundles and other kinds of miniature altars. On our honeymoon in Hawaii, Mary and I hiked up to Halawa falls on the island of Molokai, and there, at the edge of the splash pool at the base of the falls we saw a bundle of bright pink ginger flowers that someone had left there. It was late morning and we had seen nobody else on the trail on this less-visited island, but the pool had been visited that day. It was a place of connection. An offering had been made. Pilgrims may travel great distances to visit a famous or even not-so-famous shrine, bringing with them offerings of some kind, even if that offering is of their devotion only. These kinds of places serve a function, surely, or they would not be a feature of cultures throughout history and around the world. It’s the offering that matters most. It’s what we bring to the moment.

But what I realized as I finished my shopping is that we can also, must also, and in fact do also generate shrines all the time, and we can do so using time itself and the energy we bring to it as the construction material. That’s why it’s possible to create 100,000 such luminous and radiating moments in short order if we chose to do so. Thus the 100,000 Shrines concept was born, the idea being that we can change the world, right now, by expressing this kind of leadership. Think of it: 100,000 spontaneously created points of divine connection. It’s a worthy goal. Of course,“100,000” is a number I picked at random. Basically it just means “a lot”. Personally, I think we need a lot of them. But I also see the possibility that, chain-reaction style, we might, if we so choose, and sooner than we even think possible, approach something like a gazillion such constructions. Freed from the material constraints involved in building such spaces using wood or stone, we can construct places of profound connection using only the moments of time that come to us and the essential devotion we bring to them.

Any moment to which we bring our love, joy, care, compassion, gratitude, honesty, kindness, generosity, humility, humor, courage, or vitality can by these virtues gain the function of a shrine. It might just be a mother zipping up a child’s overcoat. It might be the sliding of a pat of butter into a frying pan. It might be handing money to a stranger who needs it. It might be a telephone call to a shut-in. Any such simple moment can gather around itself the equivalent of wooden beams and carved stones. Just guessing, but viewed from a higher plane, I suspect that such moments might appear adorned with marvelously inlaid mosaic designs and patterns, perhaps also even revealing within themselves the open pages of ancient, inspired texts that show up as if newly written. Mostly, as people, we just feel the goodness and beauty of these moments, and that’s more than enough — that’s plenty. But, and here’s another miraculous part, just being aware and fully alive in our feelings can further amplify the effect of such moments through us. Sharing these moments can also amplify their reach. All co-participants may feel the opening that these shrines create and the sacred space within them. As this happens, such moments radiate outward, and they radiate inward.

In an upcoming post I plan to explore more about the fascinating metaphysics of these kinds of shrine moments, you can call them “virtual shrines” if you like because they are built of the highest human virtues. But for now, the invitation here is to consider how this kind of leadership can take shape in our own lives and how we might more consciously and deliberately express this capacity, moment by moment.