Altars: A change in plans

Inspired by Miss Sugars pics and descriptions of her Altars, and since I myself and going through a major Altar upheaval, I am going to make a similar post. In fact, I am just going to go ahead and put a call out to my fellow bloggers to post some Altar pics and make this a meme.

Now a couple months ago I was writing to say how I went from having a dedicated temple space with several altars throughout the room, to wanting to condense the altars into one mega altar so that I could give a wall of the room over to storage of twin-related things.

Before the twins I had a dedicated financial altar space:

Dedicated Buddhist Altar:

A pretty large Client Altar:

A standard CM style altar, in this case set up for Angelic Magic:

Even a little Hindu Altar on the end of a bookshelf:

So anyway, I had a lot of frickin altars, and decided that I should condense them down and make room. posted a pic of the work in progress a couple months back. Here it is again:

 I was gonnna paint the walls blue, get rid of some things etc, no big deal:

Before I could do much of that though the kids had their first birthday and sitting there amidst the carnage of toys, and clothes, and stuff I had an epiphany. One that shocked everyone.

Instead of a temple room filled with Altars, or an office/storage room with one giant mega-altar in the closet, I wanted the room to look like this:

Yep. I am in the process of moving back to having most magic stuff locked away unless needed, and just a few small altars and magic knick knacks throughout the house. Strangely, it is wonderful to have everything so integrated into the rest of the house. I never thought I would say this, but dedicated temple spaces can be over-rated. Don't get me wrong, as soon as we position ourselves to find a bigger house, I will have one again, but if your work really revolves around doing the work, and not around just collecting stuff,. than it is not necessary at all. 

I am still in the process of getting things set up, but do have a few nooks set up:

I have moved the water bowl offering to the bedroom underneath my Longchen Nyingthig Thanka, in a place I am not ready to have a photo of up yet, but downstairs in the living room the new Buddhist Altar is set into a bookshelf and is as minimal as I can make it: 

The new desk is also in the Living room where I will not only write, but do my Kilaya practice and Mary work.

I haven't gotten the new wealth altar completely set up yet, but I did move my Chan-Chu, so that we have a small one near the front door to welcome in new money, and my consecrated one on a shelf where it will draw that flow of wealth from the front door, over the bookshelf and onto my desktop.

Is it ideal? Surprisingly yes. My wife spends a lot of time in the bedroom, so moving downstairs has given me more privacy even though I am in the living room. My morning offerings are almost always outside, so that hasnt changed. I am building a small workshop in the back of the garage where the Oils, Herbs, and other items can be stored and worked with easier and with less hassel than in my temple room. 

For large rituals I can temporarily take over the living room and put it back when I am done, just like I did for most of my life. 

I will post pics of the new wealth nook, the morning offering shelf, the workshop, and the new outside space as soon as they get respectable looking.