I spent my weekend building a table for a shrine in my garden. The design is crude, something I sketched in an old notebook of graph paper, all straight lines and right angles. Perhaps I should have tried something more complex — the many articles and YouTube videos I watched suggested it wouldn’t have been so hard. But I didn’t have many tools on hand, not even a table saw, and at any rate, it had been a long time since I had tried to build anything out of wood and nails.
The table will sit under a metal arbor, which I hope will soon have the violet petals of the leather flower, or clematis, climbing up it. From the rail at the center of the arbor’s arch hangs a flowerpot. Currently the pot holds mums, leftovers from our Beltane ritual earlier in the summer, but next year I would like it to hold something from the Old English “Nine Herbs Charm” – mugwort or nettle or lamb’s cress.
Those herbs are among the few solid references we have to small plants sacred to the god the poem’s authors called Woden and whom I call Odin. I am building the shrine for him, in return for a favor he did for me last December. That is the nature of my relationship with him: we make deals, we trade gifts. It never feels like “worship,” in the way that word is usually taken. Instead it is more of a mutually beneficial arrangement between myself and the voice in my head: give me this, and I will give you that, and we will both be better for it.
The author’s shrine table, the stain still wet, on his patio somewhere in Belleville, Illinois [E. Scott]
As I drive screws and hammer nails, I cannot help but think of my grandfather, who made his living doing the same. He was a small project contractor, a handyman or carpenter, and the work of his hands can be found all over the south side of St. Louis, where my family is from. In high school I used to work for him on the weekends and in the summer, a job that was more for my benefit than his. Mostly we worked on fixing up a house he once rented out that had caught on fire; he sold it to a flipper before we ever made any real headway on making it livable again.
My grandfather never taught me how to do anything delicate. The things we built tended to be square and solid: privacy fences, frames built from two by fours, one or twice an entire porch. From those memories comes my whole instinct toward joining: when I drive a screw through one board and into another, I am driving it in the way my grandfather taught me. His admonitions echo within me as I work: Straighten up that screw, watch your fingers, keep some paint on that brush.
My grandfather died last year, a few weeks after the first wave of lockdowns. I did not find out he had been placed in hospice care until the Veterans Administration building where he lived had already shut its doors against the coronavirus. When he passed, my aunt collected his ashes, but there has never been a funeral. I realized today, as I put this table together under the stern instruction of his spirit, how unresolved his death still feels – how important it remains to have that ritual of letting go.
Perhaps in creating this, building all the mistakes he taught me into its frame, I am finally having that ritual for myself.
The front of the author’s shrine table, inscribed with lines from Hávamál in his best attempt at the Younger Futhark [E. Scott]
Whether gods or ghosts, Odin or my grandfather, I owe much of who I am to difficult men. This is simply fact; both had a reputation for being capricious, hot-tempered, and sometimes outright cruel. Still, I would not be who I am without them, and there is room to honor them even while being conscious of their faults.
On the front panel of my table, I inscribed three phrases from Hávamál with a wood-burning pen. It is a famous passage, but one I take to heart in my dealings with gods: “Better not to pray than to sacrifice too much: one gift always calls for another,” as Carolyne Larrington translates it. It may seem a strange thing to engrave on a table built specifically for sacrifices, but it seemed appropriate to me. It’s dangerous to turn to a god – or an ancestor – with every trouble that arises, and foolhardy to spend too much of our lives in their shadows.
This morning I finished staining the wood, and just now I carried my table across to the yard to its new home under the arbor. It’s not quite level; I will need to dig the dirt out from the back legs. And I will need to get my pot of nettles, and plant my vines, and bring out stone statues of ravens and an offering bowl, And, and, and. I finish one thing about this shrine and it seems a dozen more spring up. I hope I’m never finished with it.
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