The Sacred in the Ordinary ✦ On Art, Attention, and a Meaningful Life

My grandmother and great grandmother both prayed over my hands.

They knew I was an artist. They believed my ability to create was a gift from God, and they reminded me not to waste it. They prayed for my hands, my mind, and my soul. They prayed for my guardian angels to protect me.

I was younger then. I understood that they loved me. I’m not sure I understood yet what it meant to have someone look at the thing you were capable of doing and treat it as sacred.

Now I do.

A Life Tended with Care

When I think about what a sacred life looks like, I think about my grandmother.

Her yard is full of plants, but they are more than plants to her. Each one carries a story. Some were given to her by friends who have since passed away. Others grow from pottery made by my tío Leo, her oldest son, who passed away when I was little. His name is still visibly signed into the pieces.

When her plants aren’t doing well, she worries about them. She feels deeply responsible for their care, their life. Watching her, I’ve realized that she isn’t simply keeping a garden alive. She is tending to relationships with people who are no longer physically here.

When she tends to her plants, she tends to their memories.

Her jewelry carries stories too. She remembers who gave her each piece, why it was given, and the occasion it marked. What someone else might see as an ordinary object, she experiences as a connection to a person, a place, and a moment in her life.

She wears memories with love.

She prays every night, the same way I remember when I was a little girl. She lovingly tends and adorns an altar devoted to Catholic saints, the Virgen de Guadalupe, and Jesus. There, she prays to God, speaks to our loved ones who have passed, and prays over our entire family and her friends. She tends to her home, her body, her faith, and the things people have left in her care with an intention I have come to recognize as a form of devotion.

The older I become, the more I understand that sacredness does not always announce itself. Sometimes it looks remarkably ordinary.

The Difference Attention Makes

A sacred life does not have to be grand, public, or perfect. It can exist in the way someone waters a plant, preserves a photograph, prepares a meal, cares for an animal, or remembers the story behind a piece of jewelry.

It is created through attention.

Attention changes our relationship with the ordinary. It asks us to slow down long enough to notice what something carries, where it came from, whose hands touched it, what season of life it belongs to, and why we have chosen to keep it.

Without attention, a plant is simply a plant. A handmade pot is simply an object. A piece of jewelry is decoration.

With attention, each becomes a vessel for memory.

 

I think this is part of what my grandmother has been teaching me all along. Meaning is not always inherent in the object itself. Meaning is also created through the way we care for something.

Art as an Act of Devotion

This understanding has shaped the way I think about being an artist.

My work moves between acrylic, watercolor, linocut prints, murals, and tattooing, but each process begins in the same place, with attention to my surroundings. I study the curve of a leaf, the anatomy of an animal, the weight of a symbol, the expression in a face, or the relationship between beauty and mortality.

Creating requires me to notice what might otherwise be overlooked.

It also requires care. A watercolor cannot be rushed without consequence to overworking handmade paper. A linocut asks for patience and commitment because every carved mark becomes permanent, there is no delete button. A mural asks me to consider how an image will live within a place long after I'm gone. Tattooing carries an even more immediate responsibility, the work is entrusted to the body of another person.

 

My hands are the instruments through which these ideas become tangible.

Perhaps that is why the prayers spoken over them have stayed with me. My grandmother and great grandmother were not only praying that I would become successful. They were asking that the gift itself be protected, and that I would have the wisdom to use it well.

That distinction matters to me more as I grow older...

 

 

Talent can be used carelessly. Creativity can become disconnected from meaning. It is easy to become preoccupied with productivity, recognition, or the pressure to make more. Devotion asks something different. It asks me to remain present with the work and responsible for what I bring into the world.

 

Nature, Memory, and Mortality

Nature repeatedly appears in my work because it contains many of the truths I return to, transformation, fragility, survival, death, and renewal.

A flower blooming is beautiful partly because it will not remain that way forever. An animal can represent both vulnerability and resilience. A bone, shell, leaf, or seed can become a reminder that life is always changing form.

This is where beauty and memento mori meet in my work. Remembering death does not have to be morbid. It can sharpen our awareness of life. It can remind us to pay attention while something, or someone, is still here...

The plants in my grandmother’s yard will not live forever. Neither will the pottery, the jewelry, the house, or any of us. Yet the care she gives them matters precisely because our time with them is temporary.

Impermanence does not make something meaningless.

It makes our presence with it more important.

What We Choose to Keep

I have become more interested in the objects people protect and the reasons they protect them. Family photographs, religious images, notes and doodles, inherited jewelry, baby teeth and hair, shells found during a particular season, handmade objects, and small pieces of the natural world can quietly become part of a personal mythology.

They tell us where we have been. They remind us who loved us. Sometimes they help us remember who we are.

Sometimes, they return us to ourselves.

I keep a small piece of coral that I found during an interesting period in my life. To another person, it might appear insignificant. To me, it became a talisman, a small symbol of protection and resilience, and a reminder that meaning often finds us through the most ordinary and unexpected things.

The sacred object does not have to be valuable in a conventional sense. Its value may come from the relationship we form with it.

Art can function in the same way.

A painting becomes part of a home and witnesses the lives unfolding around it. A print can mark a transition, a place, or a person. A tattoo can carry grief, devotion, identity, protection, or transformation directly on the body.

These objects become more than decoration when they are allowed to hold meaning.

Living a Sacred Life

For me, living a sacred life is not about separating myself from ordinary life. It is about entering ordinary life more fully.

It means caring for what has been entrusted to me, my hands, my body, my work, my relationships, the natural world, and the stories of the people who came before me.

It means recognizing that devotion can look like discipline. It can look like returning to the studio, caring for an animal, keeping a family object safe, tending a garden, saying a prayer, or making something slowly and well.

It means refusing to treat life as disposable.

My grandmother’s way of living has taught me that remembrance is an active practice. Love is not only something we feel. It is something we tend.

That is also how I want to approach my work, with respect to the higher powers, with conscious attention, stewardship, and gratitude.

The prayers spoken over my hands continue through everything I create with them.

And perhaps that is what it means to honor a gift, not simply to possess it, but to remain devoted to it.

Devoted to Art & Nature.