August 19th, 2026

Sacred Space

Sacred space is an absolute necessity for everyone today. You must have a room, or a specific time of day, where you don't know what was written in the newspapers that morning, you don't know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anyone, and you don't know what anyone owes you. This is where you can simply experiment and bring out who you are and who you could be. This is the creative incubator. At first, you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred space and you use it, something will eventually happen. 

Joseph Campbell 

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The Sacred Space Found Within

i used to think sacred space was something i built.

give me enough hours, enough research, enough right effort, and i could construct an incubator for growth—a room, a practice, a system with edges i could point to and say, there. that is where the work happens.

i laugh at this now. not unkindly. it is what a life spent building teaches you to reach for.

~

campbell's words were plain enough: a room, or a time of day, where i do not know what was in the newspaper, do not know who my friends are, do not know what i owe or am owed. i read that and heard: build the room. i did not hear: become the kind of person who can stand empty-handed inside it.

the incubator was never a place. it is an attitude—an inner sanctuary i can enter regardless of what is happening outside, because it depends entirely on what is happening inside.

i missed this for years. it was standing in front of my face the whole time.

~

so the sacred space i am learning now is not a room i enter to work. it is a room i enter to dissolve.

solve before coagula. stop knowing. stop managing. the three unknowings campbell names are not incidental. they are the scaffolding of the constructed self, and sacred space is where the scaffolding comes down, plank by plank, until what is left is closer to prima materia than to anything i would call finished.

~

i wake now with a different desire. not to explore my idea of the uncharted territory—i have explored enough of my own ideas. i want instead to be brought a whisper of the path for today, and i want the tawakkul to follow it without first deciding where it leads.

this is the third step lived in miniature, practiced daily instead of declared once: desirous, willing, possessed of the wherewithal to show up. and then, genuinely, not knowing. a small fana, practiced before breakfast.

~

i did not own this practice before. i did not know this inclination existed in me. but i understand now that i must become an explorer of these spaces the way a child explores—without agenda, without the need to build anything at all.

i am learning to let a power greater than myself lead me into the contemplation of where i am in this metamorphosis. the truth does not need my construction. it needs my willingness.

the room was never missing.

i was.