December 5, 2009
I Peret 1, Year 17
I’ve been feeling lately like one of those acrobats who balance spinning plates on the ends of poles. It’s challenging to keep them all in motion without dropping anything. I’ve been working on my first novel, which means that this blog lost momentum for a while. Now I have a new freelance assignment, and I also need to prepare for the Bast festival that I’ll be hosting at the shrine in a couple of weeks, plus assorted other projects, as always. At least I’m never stuck with nothing to do.
But during this last week I managed to squeeze in Senut once, for the first time in a long while. And there was so much joy in it, so much that it made my heart sing. At the center of the spinning, there is this, this — the hush of Zep Tepi in the instant before the song of creation, the perfection of the single unfolding moment.
Today is the first day of the first month of Peret, the Kemetic season known as “growing,” the time of planting and tending the fields after the influx of the floodwaters has receded. And it’s snowing here, the first reasonably serious snowfall of our New Jersey season. It seems contradictory at best to honor the growing time as we sink deeper into the darkness of winter’s short days, as the last leaves lose their grasp and fall, leaving stark branches reaching up against the snow-heavy, cloudy sky. And yet, growing doesn’t start with the first green shoots. It starts with the bare field, harrowed and plowed, with the seed pressed down into the darkness beneath the soil and left to lie there in stillness and silence, the new plant curled up within, waiting for its time.
Tonight I’ll light a candle and offer perfume and cool water to Bast, in honor of the new month. And I’ll pray for the renewal to be found in rest, and the promise of the flowering that’s to come.
Dua Bast! Nekhtet!