Yesterday was the seventh anniversary and although I had a quiet moment, I didn’t celebrate like I used to each year because I have no ‘home’. I’m still living out of boxes (which can be utterly frustrating at times) so I still don’t have my sacred space with my collection of sacred objects. Where I’m currently living is not my home, it’s a transitional place… a passage from one phase in live to another, a phase of cleansing, forgiving and rejuvenating.

But just because I have no sacred space, doesn’t mean I didn’t think about things; I did contemplate. But it was different this year… I cooked (my recipe), not the traditional Indonesian meal but one that my dad used to enjoy very much come to think of it. Braising steak with carrots, sweet onions, a bulb of garlic, bay leaf, cloves, stock and some secret ingredients *wink*. It had been simmering for hours filling the house with a beautiful aroma.

Later in the evening I stood outside watching the sky and talking to my dad while the wind was roaring around the house. After seven years of spending this day without my family for profound reasons I got to spend it with them today, not by choice but merely because it just happened to be that way. It was okay… but next year I will spend it near my sacred space again because next year I will have moved on to the next phase of live…

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As in many sacred architectural forms in Indonesia, the house is not only seen as a mere dwelling place, it is regarded as a symbol of the cosmos linking the divine world to that of man. In such places, the immaterial world and the material world are continuously interacting, and the harmony between the living and the world beyond is kept through rituals and offerings. As the invisible penetrates into the world of the living, so it needs to be identified in the material world.

Each of the spirits are given their appropriate attributes as tangible objects, and it is through these objects that they are identified during rituals. If the house is regarded as a living, heavenly altar on earth, ancestor worship is also common within the village and elsewhere needing blessings from the invisible forces.

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