Morning Altars®
Morning Altars® is a contemplative earth-art practice that invites us to slow down, pay attention, and enter into relationship with the living world around us.
Using leaves, stones, flowers, seeds, feathers, branches, and other materials offered by the land, we create temporary works of beauty—only to eventually release them back to the Earth.
The practice is simple. But what it teaches us is not.
Abundance is Relational
One of the things we love most about Morning Altars® is that we never create alone—The land provides the materials. The seasons determine what is available. Wind, weather, animals, decay, and time eventually reshape what we make.
We participate, but we are never the sole creator.
And perhaps this is one of nature’s quiet lessons about abundance: we flourish through relationship.
What we create comes from what has already been given. Our attention changes what we notice. Our hands participate in rearranging what is here. And when the altar is complete, we leave it to become part of something larger again.
Morning Altars® gives us a tangible way to practice reciprocity rather than extraction—to receive from the Earth, create in relationship with her, and return what we have borrowed.
The Practice
Morning Altars® was created by artist, author, and ritualist Day Schildkret, whose work explores impermanence, creativity, ritual, and our relationship with the natural world. Mother Jennifer is our certified Morning Altars® facilitator trained in his seven-step practice.
The experience begins by wandering. Not searching for the “right” materials, but noticing what is already present—A fallen leaf, stone, seed pods, pine cones, shells or rocks. Something ordinary we might otherwise have walked past.
From what we gather, an impermanent altar begins to emerge.
There is no artistic experience required and no particular outcome to achieve. The practice is less about making something impressive and more about becoming attentive enough to participate in what wants to be created.
Beauty. Attention. Impermanence.
An altar may last an afternoon. Sometimes only a few minutes. Eventually, the wind moves something. Rain comes. A bird takes a seed. Petals wilt. Leaves return to the soil.
Nothing about the altar asks to be preserved. And that is part of the teaching. Morning Altars® invites us to experience beauty without possessing it, creation without controlling it, and participation without needing permanence.
It becomes a practice of noticing what is here, honoring what is changing, and learning when to let go.
Day’s work specifically uses the ephemeral nature of these altars as a way of exploring change, renewal, remembrance, and the cycles of life.
"Our ruptured relationship with mess is corollary to our own resistance to let go and see ourselves, our work, our life connected to a much bigger story. Letting go is the giant exhale that reminds us that we can’t hold onto everything forever and that everything we possess, including our own bodies, are a part of life's cyclical give and take. Letting go allows the mess to be included back into the whole story again as a source of where we come from and where we’re going to.”
— Day Schildkret
Creating Together
Morning Altars® can be practiced individually, but some of our favorite experiences happen when we create together. One person notices a material that another overlooked. Someone begins a pattern. Another responds to it. Slowly, something emerges that no single person planned.
These shared altars become a practice of co-creation: listening, contributing, making room, responding, and allowing the whole to become more than any one person could have created alone. Perhaps that is why this practice has become such a natural part of many Loto retreats, ceremonial gatherings, and Forest Church.
We are not simply making an altar. We are practicing another way of being in relationship—with ourselves, with one another, and with the Earth.
Interested in collaborating to bring Morning Altars® to your next online or in-person event?
Contact us for more information.
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