This is not a spiritual article. This will not subscribe to any of the belief systems that flourish on Kenyon’s campus. This is about personal connection and finding strength anywhere you can amidst the tensions of college life. This, specifically, is about the second shelf above my desk in my Kenyon College dorm room.
My shrine is not connected to a deity, though they can be if you choose. I use the word shrine as a location of concentrated mental energy. College can mess with your sense of reality, especially as a still-adjusting First-Year. Campus isn’t quite home yet, but your hometown definitely isn’t either. As is a theme in my articles, I recommend taking any opportunity you have to ground yourself.
I have three animal figurines on my shrine shelf. On unplanned Sundays, my dad and I used to go to A.C. Moore and pick random art supplies that we never ended up really using, but the idea of creativity sustained us, and we always used the spray paint eventually. Once, he bought me a miniature male turkey, and it’s never quite been able to stand up straight. Next to him is a moose, brought from Maine by a friend from childhood who I’ve since lost touch with. Good terms notwithstanding, we don’t talk much, but the moose remains. The last one is a ram that I bought this summer on a family vacation. My sisters and I had a lunch date and at a toy store we wandered into I picked this one out for my soon-to-be-college home. I have always identified rams with affection, and I wanted a physical reminder of this to come with me to school. Though I could give each animal more significance than their origin stories, I don’t think I need to. They are my guardians.
From my soul sister who now goes to school at the University of Edinburgh, there is a small Scottish flag and two vials of sand from the trip she took to Namibia this summer. I have two notes from my roommate and a letter with a hand painted lily flower from a friend back home. There’s a Tibetan singing bowl given to me by my dad for my 17th birthday. It sings for me clearer than for anyone else; it resonates with my particular vibrations.
Before I left for Ohio, my sister gave me two wrapped packages for my graduation gift. In one, was a delicate silver chain with three birds—us three sisters. In the other was a green box with a jaunty bunny on the top. The bunny box, as it is now fondly named, was given to her by our aunt when she went to college. In August, she gave it to me and inside were hundreds of strips of paper. She wrote down hundreds of quotes from Whitman and One Direction and people I’ve never heard of and put them all in this box. The bunny box sits on my shrine shelf as a centerpiece of my college existence, as my sisters are in my life.
I have a strong internal balance that I’ve worked hard to maintain, and I’ve come to realize there is no weakness in helping yourself keep what you can on track. A special corner of the library, a specific morning walk, or a shrine shelf will support this endeavor of creating groundedness in your tumultuous university life. You might still be balking at the word shrine, and that’s fine. Call it your pretty things shelf, your delicate items corner. Bring fresh flowers to it every day or only look at it once month. Forget it’s there until you need it, and then remember where it is. Spirituality is about faith and consistency, and you are allowed to find that, shrine shelf or not, wherever you wish.
Image Credit: Spiritual Musclehead, Development Crossroads