Situating Prayer: A Personal Reflection on Death, Ritual, and the Temple of the Heart

There are moments when time seems to collapse inward, as though it folds along a secret seam only the soul can sense. In that silence, everything that has gone before and everything still to come seem to breathe together. I felt this the morning I learned that Helena had died – my neighbour, friend, mountain grandmother figure, lover of plants and pack and sky. The news came just after the autumn equinox, a hinge-time in the year when the light tips toward darkness and the air itself begins to speak of thresholds.

My eyes moved first to her candle. It was still burning, the same flame I had kept for her for months. Then I went out into the garden to tell the bees. They were hovering near the door, as they had been all morning while I worked on the wildflower chandelier I’d been making for her – I had planned on bringing it to her that morning and hanging it near her bed. I told the bees softly that she had gone, and then moved through the garden letting green family know, touching the plants gently as I went. The fox’s den beneath the pine was quiet. The hedgehog had curled itself into the leafy hollow between the compost heap and the rowan tree in the west corner of the garden. It felt like the world was listening.

The offering of smoke and wind

I gathered the clay vessel I’d made years ago for incense offerings – wild clay from the land we are part of, shaped by hand, spiralled at the base. Into it I placed the Sol blend, a libation for the sun, since she passed on the hour and day of the sun. I asked that light guide her path home, westward toward the setting sun where, in our (Irish) tradition, the soul travels along the golden path across the sea. Venus incense followed, for gentleness, compassion, and love. Then a summer solstice honey incense, to soothe the wounds carried by the body and release the ache that illness leaves behind. I placed feverfew, tansy and rose, late blooms of the season, around the rim – the feverfew to ease pain, rose to open the heart, tansy for release, to untie any threads that might hold her here, and drew a ring of red ochre around the rim of the dish for protection on her way. Finally, I added leaves of Artemisia, moon herb, for the balance of the elements – sun and moon, light and dark, visible and unseen.

I went to the south corner of the garden, the direction of fire and the sun. When I lit the incense, the north wind rose suddenly behind me and fanned the smoke from south to north – from the fire’s element to the earth’s. I took it as a sign, an answering breath. The smoke carried over the fence, toward the window of her room, the same view she’d looked upon every morning.

The flower votives and the fly agaric

Just four days earlier we were celebrating her eighty-first birthday. I brought a basket of home grown food, wild berry preserves, and two large glass votives, each adornend with pressed wild native blossoms – every species that had flowered in the garden since the snow melted in the spring, placed in the order in which it flowered this year. Some of these were plants she and her husband had once carried down from the mountain on their backs and gifted to me when we moved in. To bring them back to her now felt like completing a circle. To me, these votives were small illuminated chapels of flowers, dedicated to her, a way of bringing the garden, and the seasons, to her bedside.

I lit the candles inside the salt rocks I’d given her the year before, and the votives too, and she asked me to sing her an Irish song. I sang as she drifted into sleep. Before leaving, she asked that I hand her the dried fly agaric that I brought her – the first of the season, a tradition we’d kept since her husband’s death. They had gathered mushrooms every autumn and she hadn't returned to the woods since he passed six years earlier. She smiled, kissed the mushroom, and fell asleep with it still in her hand. When I returned the next day, it was still there.

Two funerals, two worlds

Her ashes were interred quietly. There was no wake, no vigil. A brief gathering in the cemetery, holy water was sprinkled, a few words were spoken, and then it was done. The previous day in Ireland, another friend’s funeral took place, and it could not have been more different – the whole community turned out, music, songs, dance, stories, laughter and tears shared like bread. Two funerals within twenty-four hours – one a living ritual of community, the other pared to silence. The contrast was striking, not in judgment, but in recognition of how differently we meet death.

In Ireland, death is a communal fire. People bring food, open doors, tend animals, light candles, sit through the night. The grieving are held in practical and spiritual ways. Here, I found myself outside that circle. No community gathered, no hum of stories, no shared remembering. So I did what I knew – I situated prayer within myself. I held vigil in the quiet of my own home, tending the flame, speaking to her spirit, creating her favourite foods as offerings for the souls voyage, holding space in the temple of the heart.

The fire and the bog

A few nights later, I lit the season’s first turf fire. Turf is always reserved for special occasions. Usually this is done at Samhain, but the hearth had been cleaned and blessed earlier that equinox. The flames rose in every colour of the rainbow. I thought of it as her fire. When it cooled, I gathered the red ash for glaze – as I had done for loved ones over the years. From these ashes I adorn wild clay vessels that hold memory both in their body and on their surface. To hold them is to nod to those whose bodies have become part of the land again. It is a way of situating prayer in the hands and filling the cup with their memory.

The bog has always been sacred in Ireland – our dark heartland, keeper of bones, memory, and medicine. The turf that burns in the hearth is the body of the earth itself. To work with its ash is to bring the earth’s fire indoors, transforming grief into glaze, pain into form. These vessels are votives in their own right – libations of soil and spirit, empty yet full. Your life becomes the offering, therefore these vessels are always filled to the brim.

Omens and emissaries

In the days that followed, the garden filled with signs. A woodpecker appeared in the elder tree outside the door – the first I’ve ever seen here in the garden. It arrived again today while writing these words. Blue jays, absent since the storm that tore through last year, returned in number. They always make me laugh as their song sounds like they are perpetually squabbling with one another. Blackbirds, who normally retreat to lower ground in the east of the country by autumn, stayed close, their songs cutting through the quiet mornings. Herons began arriving into the area, standing tall in the fields along the river like sentinels. These were not coincidences but communications – the land speaking back, as it always does when a threshold has been crossed.

Ritual, disappearance, and the heart’s work

It struck me how little room modern society leaves for ritual. We’ve become a culture of constant production and communication, yet little real connection. Ritual once wove meaning through the everyday – a shared symbolic language that bound community to place and soul to time. Now, in the rush of usefulness, we are losing that language. Even the rituals that survive in the wellness world are often polished and packaged, the essence diluted. The sacred made into performance. But true ritual is not spectacle. It is presence – slow, embodied, lived, intimate.

To situate prayer is to root it again in land and season, to let the elements shape the expression of grief. It may be smoke rising through wind, clay shaped by hand, a candle lit in the quiet, the bees told of a passing, a cup held in memory, or a wildflower votive left to fade. These are not gestures of belief but of belonging.

The temple of the heart

In the Irish cosmology, there are four provinces aligned with the elements – east with air, south with fire, west with water, north with earth – and a fifth at the centre, the province of spirit, the province of the heart. It is here that prayer resides when there is no community to gather around the hearth. It is here we carry the ones we’ve loved.

Death meets us all. How we meet it – alone or together, in silence or in song – shapes not only how we mourn but how we live. To situate prayer is not to perform faith, nor to replace what has been lost, but to give grief a place to rest. It is tending the hearth, lighting the fire, telling the bees, singing into the night, gathering clay, weaving flowers, or simply sitting in stillness.

It is how the invisible becomes visible again.

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