What holds the temple when the pillars are gone?

motherhood and the loss of sacred routine

I’m writing this on my back deck in my robe. It’s one o’clock in the afternoon but somehow I haven’t gotten dressed yet. My parents are in the other room putting my daughter down for her nap. They come a few days a week to help in the afternoons so I can work—but today I chose to make a beeline for the porch, computer in hand, to find a few moments to write instead.

If you’d asked me before I had a baby if I had a lot of spaciousness in my life, I’d probably have said no.

Looking back now, though, I see that my life was nothing but expansiveness.

It was expansive, because at any moment I could decide what to do with it.

Over the years of building my business, navigating chronic illness and managing the realities of a highly sensitive nervous system, I figured out a schedule that kept me balanced, healthy, and grounded.

In the mornings I woke up and, no matter the weather, I stepped outside to say my morning prayers and gratitudes. Then I made breakfast and wrote my dreams down while sipping tea. After that, I usually sat in front of my altar and did some sort of meditation or oracle card reading before settling in to write.

Then of course there were the dance classes I took, the long walks every day in the woods, and the time to lay on my belly by the creek and just listen to the rush. In the evenings, before bed, I did yoga and meditated again. Holding tumbled stones in my palms while I came back home to myself.

I made my life a temple, and these practices were the pillars that kept it aloft.

I knew all of this would change when I became a mom. But I also knew I wanted motherhood more than I wanted any of those things.

So I took the leap.

I still remember the settling shock of post-partum when I realized I really, truly, would not be able to go back.

It was several months into life as a new mom. I had hoped that once we got out of the “fourth trimester” I could start to add some of my cornerstones back in, resurrecting the structure of my life. Perhaps meditation every evening or writing down my dreams in the morning.

Then, one night, when we were in the thick of the hours-long process of getting Iona down and I had to forgo, once again, any of those practices in favor of sleep, the realization slammed into me— there was no going back.

The pillars of my life, the ones I had forged from years of figuring out what worked to support my mental and physical health, keeping me connected to my innermost self, no longer existed.

They were gone, and they weren’t coming back. At least, not in the way they existed before.

I laid under the covers and started into the darkness, processing the enormity of the change.

What defines your life when the structure falls away?

What happens to your inner sanctuary, the one you crafted so expertly, when the cornerstones disappear?

What holds the temple when the pillars are gone?

Before Iona came, I took a series of pilgrimages to the British Isles to visit the holy places of my ancestry. As I went from site-to-site, I was struck by just how many churches and chapels were built over much older places of worship.

The holy well in the tumble-down abbey that was once a wild spring.

The tor on the hillock that has always been a sacred ascent.

The cemetery that was built surrounding a yew more ancient than memory.

Seeing these places, I understood—the most holy places are not holy because of the marble that’s been forged. Or the stained glass set in the walls. They aren’t holy because the spire is tall. They aren’t even holy because the pillars still stand (because in many places, they did not).

They are holy because they’ve always been holy.

They are holy because the land itself is holy. And nothing can take that inborn wholeness away.

And so this is the truth I return to, when I reach the end of another day where meditation, or a long walks, or writing down my dreams simply wasn’t possible.

The temple never needed holding.

The temple existed before the first marble was cut. And the temple continues to exist long after the pillars fall.

The temple is me. Without any accoutrements or practices or routines— I continue to be holy simply because I exist.

The holiness lives in the groundwater of me.

I may forget it’s there. Or how to stop and drink. It may get boarded up, forgotten about, left behind. Perhaps even for decades. But it never stops running.

So what holds the temple when the pillars are gone?

Nothing.

Because the temple never needed to be held to be whole.

And maybe this is the gift of motherhood— it gives you the opportunity to realize that, even when everything else drops away, the essence remains.

That the pillars of your life can fall, every routine can die, the entire way in which you structured your understanding of yourself can crumble….and the indescribable wholeness of who you are remains.

Because who you are isn’t what you do.

It’s not your roles or routines. It’s not what you create, or how people see you.

Who you are goes beyond, far beyond, all of that.

And in the moments when nothing can be done. When you long for the practices that once held your life. When you reach the end of the day and only have the energy to crash into bed, remember…

You are the green hill, growing beyond memory.

You are the water so clear it runs silver, flowing forever over stone.

You are the silence at the center of the Earth that says “I’m here, I’m here”

You are a temple that needs no pillars.

You are holy place in this world.

And like the glen that lives through the dolmens and barrows, the chapels, and churches and pilgrimages—you will remain.

You are whole, you are home—simply because you exist.