that damn altar

06 May, 2026

This post has been brought over from my Medium page, where it existed first. From April 2026 onward, all of my writing will be published here first and syndicated elsewhere.

My altar is in a box in my closet, waiting to be transported to my new home.

I know which box. The one with the tarot deck wrapped in silk, the pendulum I made to speak to my dead grandmother with, the white sage I haven’t run out of yet because I bought it in bulk when I owned a metaphysical shop.

I tell myself I’ll set my altar up when I move next week. We’ll see.

There was a version of me who had multiple altars. One in each corner of my bedroom, one in the middle of the living room. Crystals arranged by intention. Candles I’d light before meditating with 432 hz humming through my headphones.

That version of me had time. Or maybe she just had fewer children. Or maybe she hadn’t entered the deepest phase of healing yet, the one that demands every ounce of energy you have.

I grieve her sometimes. The woman who could sit still for twenty minutes without someone needing something. Who knew exactly where her pendulum was. Who wrote in her Santa Muerte journal every morning like it was a prayer, which I guess it actually was.

I want to be her again. I also know I can’t be.

Altars require tending. You can’t just set them up and let them collect dust. Well, you can, but then they stop being altars and start being decoration. Or worse, reminders of who you’re not anymore. I think that’s why mine is still in the box. Easier to carry the potential of devotion than to face how inconsistent I’ve become at it.

Sometimes the altar is the returning itself.

Not anything physical. Not the crystals. Not the perfect setup or the daily ritual or the proof that you’re spiritual enough to maintain something sacred. Just the fact that you keep coming back when it’s been weeks. Even when you’ve forgotten what all the hertz frequencies sound like. Even when your practice looks nothing like what you thought devotion was supposed to look like.

I do lymph massages on myself sometimes, when I remember. I light the white sage and walk through the apartment, letting the smoke curl into corners, clearing what needs clearing. I think about writing every day — free writing with no purpose except to let something move through me — and some days I even do it.

It doesn’t look like the altar I had before. It doesn’t feel as intentional, as curated, or as holy.

I have five kids. I have healing to do that I didn’t even know needed doing until recently. I have a life that refuses to stay still long enough for me to arrange it into something photogenic.

The house I’m moving into next week has better light. I’ve already picked out the corner where I’ll set things up. The crystals I haven’t touched in months. The pendulum. The sage. Maybe I’ll add something new, like a candle I haven’t burned yet, or a stone I find that feels good in my hand.

Maybe I’ll meditate there every morning like I used to. Maybe I won’t.

Maybe the altar is about the fact that I keep packing it. Keep moving it from home to home. Keep believing, somewhere underneath the exhaustion and the distraction and the very real demands of being alive right now, that it still matters. That I still matter. That the part of me who needs this hasn’t disappeared, she’s just waiting.

She’s in the box with the tarot cards. She’s in the mornings I manage to write three pages before anyone wakes up. She’s in the sage smoke, in the intention behind it, even when I can’t articulate what I’m clearing or why.

She’s in the lymph massage, the way I press into the tender spots and breathe and let something release that I didn’t know I was holding.

She’s in the hope that next week, or next month, or whenever I’m ready, I’ll unpack that box and build the altar again.

And when life knocks it down, because it will, I’ll rebuild it.

The version of me who had time is gone. I grieve her. But the version of me who keeps coming back — she’s here.

She’s always been here.

Next week, I’ll unpack that box. Set up the altar in the corner with the good light. It won’t be the same altar. I’m not the same woman.

But I’ll be the woman who believes that she still deserves a corner of her life that’s holy.

Even if some weeks she forgets it’s there.

Even if she has to build it again, and again, and again.

#essays