Wild Altars: The Final Chapter

I’m home again, back to tame lawns instead of wild canyons. Back to ordinary life after encountering bewildering magic and mystery.

Now that I’m back, I’ve taken to carrying my wild altar around my small town in the backpack. Let’s just say, I've gotten some looks.

Like the time I decided to bring the wild altar to a bowl of earth I walk by nearly every day with my dogs. My guess is it’s meant to capture extra stormwater so the neighborhood doesn’t flood.

When I’d passed by the bowl earlier with my dogs, I could smell the lingering scent of smoke in the air and see it was black with char.

As my dogs strained to continue on, I stared at the scorched land, which had clearly just undergone a controlled burn.

I knew I had to come back with the wild altar.

When I got back home, I let the dogs off their leashes and packed her up. Because I was short on time, I drove back to the bowl.

An old man was walking along the path beside the bowl with his small dog when I returned. I sat in my car, waiting for him to pass. He slowed down, curious to figure out what I was doing.

It’s one thing to hike around a deserted desert and pull the altar out and set her up. It’s another to do so in a small town where everybody’s business is everybody’s business.

“God bless it,” I mumbled, when it became obvious the old man was not going to walk on until he knew what I was doing.

I climbed out and walked to the back of my car. When I hefted the backpack onto one shoulder, the old man saw the wood sticking out and said, “You gonna mark something down there?”

“No,” I wondered how in the hell I could describe what I was doing. “I, uh, I have this wild altar, and I take pictures of her in the world.”

The pause that followed is one that many Minnesotans would be familiar with—it’s the pause in which the person is trying to remain Minnesota nice while still conveying that’s the strangest thing they’ve ever heard.

“Oh. Huh. Well,” the man finally said. He took another step or two, and yet it was obvious he was not about to walk on and miss whatever I was going to do.

Down into the bowl I went, kicking up ash that danced on the wind’s strong back. The soles of my shoes immediately turned black, and I knew I didn’t want to put my sheepskin rug down on this.

Thankfully, I had worn old jeans, so I didn’t mind dropping down on my knees to set up the wild altar. I could feel the man watching me.

I took a picture.

Then another from a different angle. And another.

Every time I moved, the wind carried the ash away.

I was so enthralled, I no longer cared if the man was standing there or not.

I took a video.

The wild altar was doing what she did—she made that scorched piece of earth in the middle of a small-town neighborhood as sacred as any wild canyon I’d carried her through.

When I owned a house for a minute a few years ago, I hired a local earth whisperer to turn my huge yard into a miniature prairie. He told me he would come back every spring to do a controlled burn.

He said it helped to remove the old to make way for the new.

To get rid of the dry and the dead.

To clear away the unnecessary tangles and create space . . . room . . . for the new things to grow.

I didn’t know if or when the old man walked on. I stayed there, kneeling on a bed of ash in the middle of a quiet neighborhood.

Kneeling on ordinary seeds that had received exactly what they were longing for—a spark of new life, so they could burst out of their shells and rise.

The wild altar bepainted by ash.

If you would like to have your own wild altar experience, consider joining me on Saturday at the Avon Hills Folks School! https://avonhillsfolkschool.org/courses/p/wild-altars-may-3-2025