19.5″ T x 5″ D x 16″ W
Using wooden dowels, pieces of yardstick, I manipulated a plastic box to look like a giant book. I’m using mulberry paper to create a book shrine that looks organic and as though it might have sprung from the forest floor.
As I embarked upon this project, I was thinking of ancient texts, and illuminated manuscripts. In service to this train of thought, I stumbled upon a news story of an ancient, 9th century Celtic book shrine discovered in 1986 in a lake in Longford County village in Ireland. After a meticulous 40 year restoration, Ireland’s largest and oldest Lough Kinale Book Shrine was going on display at the National Museum of Ireland (in a magically named exhibition entitled “Words on the Water”.).
The idea of this Irish brook shrine reverberated for me across aspects of my genealogical heritage. This ancient technology of manuscript preservation functions just as it is named. The container is associated with a saint, decorated with metal, stone, hinges and the box permanently sealed.

Gaelic word for book shrine: cumdach (pronounced KOOV-dax) is an elaborately ornamented metal reliquary box or shrine used in Early Medieval Ireland to hold sacred manuscripts and relics.

So, that is how morphed from an illuminated manuscript to an illuminated book shrine.

I decided to use mulberry paper and found objects to convey the fragile habitat of the natural world around us.

I have the piece wired so it can be hung on the wall. However, I wonder it display on a standing display might be better? More like an antiquity.

I’ve been falling back on my contemplation on Native American thinking:
Relationality: We are all related to each other, land and spirit word.
Interconnection between sacred and secular. Spirituality a necessary component of learning.
Holism: Everything is connected.
Four Dimensions of Knowledge and Holistic Learning:
Emotional – Heart
Spiritual – Spirit
Cognitive – Mind
Physical – Body

The Washington Park Cottage Connection
Lo, these many months now, I have been engaged with the Friends of Washington Park and a smaller group who are working on the script for the crankie we are making. No doubt, we have struggled to understand the history. The land has changed hands so many times it is nearly impossible to convey in a short performance. We struggled even to understand the “who” of the narrator. Just this past week, however, we had a breakthrough.

Rather than meeting at the library, or Starbucks, we gathered at the shelter at Washington Park. As we lingered long after lunchtime, we all gathered snacks from our vehicles and had an impromptu potluck. We were joined by Brittany Flowers from the Christiansburg Institute. She was struck that Washington Park IS a part of Gainsboro AND Burrell Hospital. Playwright David Burnette joined us and his epiphany came the next day.

“Miss Janie, the LAND is the narrator!”

Holy Cow! Why didn’t I see that before? Now, we have a start. It begins with the sound of drums. The lyrics:
“It’s the world we live in. It’s the land we live on”.
The caretakers of the land: the Tutelo or Tutero. Monacan. Always giving thanks.
Then came the white extractors of the land and people. Never giving thanks.

Then, again came the caretakers of the land. The story of the cottage is the story of joy of the caretakers and honoring the land, creation with gratitude. It becomes a story of reciprocity.

“I went down to the ocean-asking her my name
and she laughed deep and ancient, tossing her soaking mane.
She wrapped her arms around me, pushed me gently back to shore,
remarking as she receded, “You’ve always known the door”.

When I was a young woman, only an audience with the actual ocean would do for the emotional, cognitive and spiritual renewal I feel commended to seek at times. Even the brackish waters of the bay used to make me feel slightly cheated; so close, yet not quite ocean. Now, thankfully, with age and wisdom, I can find the connection of water from mountain to sea. In service to this project, I have allowed my observation and experience of nature to be where I am….Lick Run Greenway…Kiptopeke State Park on the bayside of the Eastern Shore…Assateague and Chincoteague Islands.

Working with Dillard’s work has definitely made me more observant in nature. I’ve enjoyed the site of a snail in its slo-mo, majestic passage. I found a cluster of Ringless Honey mushrooms. For the first time, I saw deer and fox on Chincoteague! It didn’t occur to me they would be there. There was one experience that brought the cruelty of nature to life. I sat outside our RV in the mornings drinking my coffee and using Merlin Bird to identify calls. All of the sudden, there was a tremendous ruckus in the pines high above us. Bird screeched. Squirrel chattered. I never saw the thief as anything more than a blurr. Merlin bird identified a Peregrine Falcon, so perhaps that? The mother squirrel continued ascending high into the tree trying to save her offspring. Finally, she stood on a limb, keening to the sky for a half an hour. That lament was so sad, unjust, unfair to the squirrel- and the same incident was so beneficial to the falcon who perhaps was showing her own progeny how to hunt. I still feel conflicted at life for both predator and prey.

Not only am I rereading “Pilgrim”, but I am pouring through papers and articles written about it as well. It makes me go back in my mind’s eye to encounters I or my family members had with nature and what those outcomes looked like and what they meant to me. It makes me think how one’s own encounters/observations with nature can inform so much better than warnings from someone fearful.

Me-Dillard prays to God through nature. Doesn’t entirely trust God, calling him a “maniac”, “ like a monk on the road carrying a hot coal which doesn’t warm him and which he does not need-but with which he won’t part. She trusts nature…but still sees reflected both beauty and terror.

“But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.”
—Job 12:7–8

The primary question was about dedicating the Book Shrine to a saint, tying the work to my ancestral heritage and spiritual practice. This was not so very difficult.
In a little nook in my home is a framed third-class, Catholic relic that I have cherished since I was a child. I can remember when my Mother pulled it out and let me hold it for the first time when I was in 2nd grade. It was a suede heart, the size of the palm of your hand, intricately beaded all over. In the center was a drawing of Native American woman in a blue cloak.

This was Kateri Tekakwitha, Mohawk woman (Father was a Mohawk Chief, mother was Catholic Algonquin) and the first Native American Saint in Catholicism. My Mother’s family would travel in the summer to spots all over the eastern U. S. A. and Canada to visit the homes and families of venerated Catholics. This relic had come from their journey in the 1950’s to Fonda, NY. to meet Fr. Thomas Grassman, Franciscan Friar and founder of the Fonda Memorial Shrine of Catherine Tekakwitha. Here, the saint lived most of her life in the late 1600s. Within the Catholic faith, she is the patron saint of Native Americans, the environment, nature, ecology and ecologists. In my Mother’s travels in the 50’s, she would often see “Indians” in little villages in Canada, upstate New York and Florida. The narrative I received from her about Native Americans was always what a beautiful people they are and what a raw deal they received from colonization. I became a fan of Kateri that day, even taking the name “Kateri” as my Confirmation name years later.

It is, of course, not lost on me that Kateri’s baptism into Catholicism was and is a part of the colonization of the First People. For me, because of the faith, I was exposed to Kateri and she definitely influenced my interests in Native ways, the environment, nature and Fourth World knowledge. She’s the guidepost that led me to Rachel Carson and Jane Goodall and Lawrence Anthony.
Kateri Tegawitha is the Patron Saint of Ecology and the Environment.
The other challenge was wanting to depict the lamenting squirrel incident within the project. I think I must refrain from that and instead embrace the tension of the incident.

Highest self (me)

To me, bringing one’s highest self is thinking with one’s soul, which is linked spiritually with all creation and the Higher Power. It centers nurturing one another to the greater good. The higher self makes decisions and engagement guided by love, abundance and bringing about the greatest fruition of our ancestor’s wisdom and dreams. It is unencumbered by ‘ego’. Ego makes decisions and engagements based on fear, lack, scarcity, greed (for money or fame or “being right”) and self enrichment. 

NA

DCJ -Okay to Pay
$500
300065-2010
Percent for Art
9/24/25