What shapes can prayers take?

Lines drawn in walnut ink with dip pen.

In my mind, prayer and sacrifice are bound together. One cannot sacrifice something without a prayer to direct and intend the actions, though a prayer can come without the sacrifice of a physical object. I would still say that a prayer is a sacrifice. The individual doing the prayer is committing time, concentration and attention to the process. In our modern era all three of these things are in high demand and low stock. We are begged for our attention. Sometimes even tricked into giving it. Yet, we only have so much given time on the earth. This implies that our time, like our money is a limited resource and should be spent on things we truly care about. Thus, making our time and attention a powerful thing to sacrifice to a chosen deity.

I find gods in the mundane. The things we turn our attention to everyday, without perhaps even realizing we do. The TV is an easy one to point to. I know I personally set what little time I have aside to spend time with it. I think this is a really interesting action. Am I sacrificing my time at the altar of the television? I am not speaking words or incantations, but if we consider time and acknowledgment as a form of worship then I would say that I do worship this new god. One could say the same for computers, phones and many other objects that we give money, time and attention to.

This line of thinking has made me consider what I give my time to. What gods do I want to worship? The idea of god is in everything. I think when I started my work with dirt, I picked dirt because it was one of the most mundane things I could think of. Yet, I was blown away by its complexity the more I worked with it. I now know that the gods are in the dirt.

Lines drawn in finely ground clay slurry with dip pen.

This research began my search for the gods. I had been interested in mythology most of my life and now was discovering my own within the natural objects that I was using. Pilgrim At Tinker Creek and other books like it became my bible. I began to wonder what prayers might look like if I continued this line of thinking. Within the mythology of dirt and its scale of hierarchy what does a prayer look like. I looked for ways to make nontraditional prayers to the gods. What shapes could my prayers take?

In a new small extension of my work I have started making pieces that I am calling Timelines. I thought about prayer a lot when I made them. I wanted to take an action and then repeat it over and over again. So, I started making these marks not really knowing what to do with them. They are similar to tally marks. This mimicking of counting or keeping track of seems to be a fitting feeling that matches on of a clock, though never as precise. Once they are done, they have a landscapeness about them. Yet, despite all the things that they look like they are a collection of lines. An action repeated until the specified area is filled.

I time the process to see how long it takes; some are quick, and some are slow. Because I am doing the same motion over and over again it becomes meditative for me. Like meditation, some days I have more patience to spend with them while other days I have a harder time focusing on the task of just being. Just being; what a heavy term to consider. The river of time is moving even when we are not watching. These drawings are a vignette of myself trying to focus in on this time.