The Altar You Never Set Up

Here is what probably happened, and I think you have been blaming yourself for the wrong thing. To set up an altar, you need a surface. To get a surface, you need to clear the dresser. To clear the dresser, you have to deal with the pile on the dresser. The pile contains mail. The mail contains at least one envelope you have been actively avoiding since June. So the altar is not actually waiting on candles or moon phases or your commitment to the craft. The altar is waiting on an envelope.

That is an entirely different problem than the one you thought you had.

There is a second thing happening too. An altar is a project with no true finish line; it just sort of continues, and every time you look at it you can see the ways it isn’t finished. For a brain that runs on completion and novelty, an eternally unfinished but aesthetic project is almost the perfect trap. You will start it, get it to about seventy percent, look at it, feel vaguely disappointed, and then you will avoid the entire corner of the room for a month. Ask me how I know.

None of this means you don’t want an altar. It means you built the requirements for one before you built the damn thing.

So let’s just go ahead and take the whole concept apart and put it back together smaller. An altar is a place where you put things that mean something to you. That is the definition. Everything else is decoration and personal preference.

It doesn’t have to be a special table, or even a pretty one. It doesn’t have to last forever, be private, or be set up in a specific way. It doesn’t have to have anything you bought. And it definitely doesn’t have to be done, because there’s no such thing as a perfect altar, which is either a depressing or a the most free thing you’ve ever heard, depending on your perspective.

Your altar can be:

• a shelf of a bookcase you already own
• a windowsill
• a tray
• the top of your dresser, mail and all, with one candle on it
• a corner of your desk
• the dashboard of your truck
• a small tin in your bag
• a single object on your nightstand

If you are looking at that list thinking that some of those do not count, I would gently ask you who told you that, and whether they have ever tried to keep a candle lit in a house with animals in it. I am still cleaning wax off of my heater from a Scentsy warmer that got spilled by my favorite cat over a decade later.

This is the part that most general witchcraft advice gets wrong for us. A lot of people are told to keep their altar somewhere private. That is genuinely good advice for people who need discretion, and if you live somewhere that your practice would not be safe, you should absolutely keep doing that. But if your practice is private for aesthetic reasons rather than safety reasons, and you have ADHD, a hidden altar is an altar that ceases to exist.

Out of sight is not just out of mind for us. It is out of existence. If you put your practice inside a cabinet, you have filed it away. You will remember it exists roughly twice a year, both times with a small guilty jolt, and an almost guaranteed level of shame that will prevent you from utilizing it even then.

The visible altar is a note to yourself that you can’t misplace. It is the same reason your medication lives on the counter and not in a drawer. Every time you walk past it, it says "hi, remember me?!"

So put it wherever it is in your house that you will notice it without fail. Think about things like the path from your side of the bed to the coffee pot, or the spot you stand in to feed your pets. For me, it’s the windowsill above my sink because I already stare into the middle distance for far too many minutes in a day there. We don’t actually need more discipline. We just need better placement.

If I could hand one physical object to every ADHD witch I know, it would be a tray. Get a tray. It can be a serving tray, a baking sheet, a shallow basket, a cutting board, the lid of a box, and it can be as fancy or as simple as you’d like. Put your altar on that tray.

Why do you need a tray?

• It has edges and a defined size, which means it can be done. A tray is able to be complete in a way that a dresser is not.
• It moves. Did you have a bad day and you feel like practicing from your bed? Bring it with you. Want to work outside on the porch? Take it outside. Company coming and you would rather not explain the bones? Put it up somewhere without the need to rearrange everything on it.
• It survives your life. Alice, my sweet dog, does not care one bit about my sacred space if she needs to wag her tail. My cat, Artemis? She actively resents it and will immediately attempt to remind me that she is the only thing sacred allowed in my life. Even better, if something needs to go on that surface immediately, you can move the entire altar in one motion instead of relocating fourteen small objects and losing three of them permanently.
• It makes the whole thing fluid and flexible in the way your attention already is. You are not building a shrine that demands you come to it. You are building one that follows you around.

Seriously, I mean it, just one thing. Put it somewhere you will see it. That is your altar now. It is finished, and you can stop.

The object should be something that already carries weight for you, which usually means it isn’t something you bought. It can be a rock from a place that mattered, a feather (ethically and legally sourced, remember please), your grandmother's thimble, a photograph, a shell, a key that no longer opens anything, a candle you actually like the smell of.. you get the idea. Just make it mean something.

The reason to start with one is that one object cannot fail to look right. Arrangement is what breaks us and sometimes I spend hours fidgeting with the design of something that should have taken two minutes. A single object has no arrangement. It just sits there being sacred, and every time you add something later, it’s because you found it precious and not because you felt the altar needed something extra.

Most of the best altars I have had or even seen were accumulated over time. Nobody built them in an afternoon.

Let us talk about the dusty one. Maybe you did set an altar up, back in the spring, and you probably even tended to it for around eleven days. Now, as autumn approaches, there is a layer of dust, a candle that burned down unevenly, three dead flowers, and an offering dish with something in it you would rather not identify or smell. You have been avoiding that side of the room for weeks, and every time you notice it you feel like a fraud.

Everything about that altar is proof that you did it once. That’s it, nothing more complicated than that, and definitely not some weird monument to your inconsistency like your mind keeps saying it it. It is just a surface with some dust on it and a story about a week in April when you were really into this thing and the energy to participate in it.

You are allowed to wipe it down and start over. You are allowed to take everything off it and leave it empty for a while. You are allowed to move it somewhere else entirely because that corner never actually worked. And yes, you are even allowed to put the whole thing in a box and pull it back out in October when the light changes and you suddenly have a desire for it again.

Just like everything else, there is no streak to maintain here, just dust that is easily wiped away and forgotten about.

Your altar has to survive your real conditions, and I mean that practically.

• If you have cats, especially the kind that like mine are into every mischievous thing they can be into, everything on that altar is now a projectile and you should prepare it as such. Use items with heavy bases, avoid anything that is fragile, and absolutely do not put anything irreplaceable near the edges.
• If you have dogs, keep the offerings inedible or keep them elevated, because a bowl of anything at floor level is not an offering, it is always a snack and they are faster than you when you try to get it away from them.
• If you live in Texas, a taper candle left on a sunny windowsill in August will be a taper puddle by Thursday. Again, ask me how I know.
• If you have kids, or roommates, or anyone who moves through your space like a bull in a china shop, build something that can be bumped.
• If you have executive function that comes and goes, do not build an altar that you’re going to feel like you have to maintain for it to be valid.
• Avoid live flowers you will feel guilty about when they become dead flowers in a week
• Don’t use a water dish or any other liquid that will need to be changed daily and don’t buy the incense that you’ll need to keep sweeping up to avoid ashes getting everywhere.
• Build the low-maintenance version and let it be low-maintenance without apologizing for it.

Designing around your actual life probably the most important skill I’ve ever learned.

I want to end here because I think this is the thing that finally helps with the guilt. The altar is not and has never been where the magic lives. You are where the magic lives. The altar is a place marker. It is a physical object in your house whose entire job is to catch your eye on an ordinary day and remind you that you have a relationship with something, which means the bag in your closet has already partly worked. You bought those things because something in you reached for a practice. That reaching was real. The bag is just a reminder that got stuck in the wrong container.

So here is the assignment, if you want one, and you can absolutely skip it:

Go get one thing out of that bag. Just one. Put it somewhere you will see it tomorrow morning. Leave the rest of the bag alone. Deal with the envelope some other day.

You have an altar now, and it’s already complete just the way it is.