January 28, 2009
Posted in Being Kemetic, Thoughts and Reflections
at 12:28 pm
by Shefyt
Bit of a lull there, as in the wake of finishing up a couple of freelance assignments I finally had the time and mental space to really delve into a personal creative writing project, so I plunged headlong into it. It’s kind of funny that I would have more time for posting in this weblog when I’m under deadline for paying work than when I’m messing about on a piece of fanfiction, but there you go. I suppose it’s because I can dip in and out of the freelancing more easily, whereas I need to build up momentum in order to make substantial progress on the fiction, and lately I’ve been feeling a lot of internal pressure to make that progress, to finish at last the giant project that I’ve been working on for years so I can finally set it aside and go on to other things.
Lately my thoughts have been circling around the idea of what I can contribute, of how to make a difference in the world. Possibly this is inspired at least in part by the idealism of the new Obama administration, although I think, too, that I’m just getting to a point in life where I’m running up against the limits of living inside my own head. One of my current projects at work is a book about how Muslims in France form new institutions within the framework of secular French society and carve out spaces for community participation in religion, and as I read it I think, “I want that” — I want to be part of building something that’s both shared and substantive. I want to be part of the growth of the House and of Kemetic faith in general, and I want to see the beautiful results of that growth — I want us to have sacred spaces, artworks, libraries, classes, a record of artifacts, a thriving social network beyond the online forums. I want processions, damn it. We’re starting to develop some of these things, and where we have them, they’re truly precious; but as a religion we’re geographically scattered and still few, and the work is slow, and this cat gets impatient sometimes. Some days on my lunch break I sit in the university chapel to meditate, and I wonder if our hands will ever make something so large and lasting, or if the age of Kemetic monuments is past — if there will never again be the resources nor a true need for such things.
But large-scale works aside, there’s still a lot that we can do. Last weekend the HoN’s Northeast region had a New York-area get-together, the first in a series of “God of the month” discussions, and it was fantastic — not only as a social and educational gathering in and of itself, but as a chance to make plans for future events, and even more than that as a source of inspiration. One of the high points was a ritual of meditation on Sokar, Who was the focus of discussion, and Whom I had never really met before, but gazing into the eyes of His statue, I suddenly realized that I knew Him after all — the terror of the empty page waiting to be written upon, and also the wonder of it, the endless ground of potentiality. And so it is with every endeavor on the brink of its beginning. (It reminds me once more of New Year’s Eve, white on white beside the river.) It’s time to take a deep breath and step forward into life, into motion, into the projects that need to be brought out of thought and dream and into this world.
Hail, Sokar, Lord of Time, Still-heart, mighty Hidden One! Dua Netjer, nekhtet!
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January 8, 2009
Posted in Being Kemetic, Netjeru, Parks and Rivers, Thoughts and Reflections
at 8:15 am
by Shefyt
So as you might be able to guess from the last two posts (if the name of the blog hasn’t already given it away), rivers are almost certainly going to feature prominently here. Part of it is that I tend to experience Bast in an extremely riparian aspect. She’s not only the Lady of Fire but Lady of the Waters — Huntress among the reeds, flash of sunlight dazzling from the ripples, the breath of cool, green life lifting a scattering of waterfowl toward the sky. Some of my earliest — and still most profoundly moving — conversations with Her took place at the mouth of the Long Slip Canal in Hoboken, gazing out over the Hudson as I waited for my train to arrive, watching the intermittent birds and the sunset’s reflection burning across the glass-windowed face of Manhattan and the slow wavelets lapping at the abandoned pilings, and asking, “Why Egypt?”
Because everywhere is Egypt, She said to me. Everywhere the ducks fly, everywhere the water flows, everywhere the sun’s light falls.
I’ve been trying to think of a word for what the river means to me. Metaphor isn’t quite it, although it does partake of metaphor. I’ve used the river before as an image to describe my conception of Netjer, the fluid, often arbitrarily demarcated boundaries that on another level blend into unity, not just tributaries flowing into a larger watercourse but the entirety of the river basin and all that it contains. (A shift in perception: Is the slow, weed-choked widening in the stream separate from the satin-slick surge of current where the channel suddenly narrows? Where does one state transition into the next? And would the river be the same without the shape of the hillsides that funnel runoff into it, or the species that live within and around it, or the wind patterns that bring the rain? And yet you can point at the river, naming it as a singular entity, and doing so is both informative and useful.) The river is connection, like the image of the world-and-heavens-spanning Tree that it’s branching structure reflects; it’s journey, and in that it’s also life in the sense of arising, passing through different states and environments, and merging at last into an unfathomable depth, or else evaporating into the sky. It’s life as well in that its waters sustain the life around it, life in that it cradles and contains life within it.
I live now — and have lived for nearly all of my life — in a watershed valley. The brook that cuts across my property flows into a stream that feeds the North Branch of the Raritan and thus the Raritan itself, and ultimately ends in Raritan Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, if it can be said to ever truly end. I grew up playing by streamsides, and so I guess the sound and movement of the water got into me early. And the colors — fierce green of the tender new grass around a tiny spring-fed trickle, early in the year before the fields have really come back; mellow amber of the sun’s light on the rounded, leaf-shrouded stones of the river bottom; slatey or silvery or midnight blue flashes where the water’s surface captures the sky. So to me the centrality of the river to the world of Kemet, the way that Egypt and the Nile define each other, is an important point of personal congruence, a resonance that makes me feel at home.
One of Bast’s more obscure epithets is Shet, She of the Pool, and that’s one of the many faces of Her joy: the coolness, the lightness, the vivid sensation, the liquid shiver of delight. And I could probably go on and on at great length about where and how this aspect merges into some of Her other ones — Eye of Ra, Lady of the Perfume Jar, nurse and protector of the King, Firstborn of Tem — but that’s probably better suited for a book (someday!) than for the blog.
What lifts me up? I echoed in my last post.
She does.
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January 4, 2009
Posted in Parks and Rivers, Thoughts and Reflections
at 9:35 pm
by Shefyt
Well, I think I figured out why the idea of hush was so particularly attractive, considering that last night in shrine I suddenly realized just how perilously close to burnout I am right now. I’ve been running nonstop on two tight writing deadlines, one personal, one freelance, and today I had to take a little break from the personal project, at least. So I got out into the air — went for a walk, down to the stream in the local nature preserve, enjoying the chuckle of the water, the flood-flattened grasses underfoot and the clumps of dead, dry plant stems reaching high above my head, the tangles of thorns, and the beads of ice catching light, dangling from the branches that reach almost down into the river.
And I was thinking, standing at last on the small, rocky beach, about a series of elemental exercises that I was doing not too long ago. In particular, I was thinking about water, and I went back to it again, asking myself, “What do I love? What lifts me up?” And the immediate answer was, This.
Sometimes I have fits where I want to run away from this place — just run anywhere, really. And for a long time I thought that maybe that was the call of my soul, a longing to go on a quest to find my true self. But times like this I recognize that my true self is here, if it’s anywhere — in the everyday and the extraordinary, in the stress and the relief of stress, in this place that’s so familiar and yet still holds so much that I love and that I want and need to discover. I’ve lived here for almost all of my life, and today was another reminder this land and the river live in me, too, and that they can still amaze me.
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