Thursday, May 18, 2017

Shrine- Julia Schloss

Shrine in a jar

I have started making shrines before I even realized what a shrine was. I would start collecting notes and memorabilia and putting away in a shoe box every year. The shoe boxes now sit on my desk, each a shrine to one year of my life. When my mom passed away this fall, my brothers teased me saying they were finally happy that I kept so many things because we had notes and letters from her, it created its own spontaneous shrine without me even realizing it. When faced with this task for class it felt, to personal to bring in my boxes and letters from my mom but I was left with this idea of putting things away. After the Buddha readings and the connection between attachment and suffering it gave me the idea to put together my box idea and attachment and create a jar where we can put away those memories for safe keeping but open up room for other memories. Putting in some control over the choices of what memories we get to keep. The jar came to me over my love of snow globes. The last gift my mom gave me was a snow globe. And it has transformed to something much more. Its like life, when you shake it the snow goes everywhere but as it settles the image re appears. Just like life we are shaken, flipped, bumped, but at some point the dust settles and things are clear again. The jar of our memories can be shaken but the memoires will stay intact in the jar. We are clearing the way and making new ones. I’m glad it will sit in your office of safe keeping, serving dual purposes of some sort of shrine to the class, a way to remember this awesome spring term.  

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