March 30, 2010
Set, Lord of the Oasis
Two weeks ago, witch hazel and white crocus were ablaze all along Shapiro Walk. Last week, those fiery explosions had already faded and dried to a dark maroon, and the crocuses had slumped down onto the mulch, their lightless petals shriveled and translucent. This week the forsythia are in full cry, and the lily-flowered magnolias are just cracking their buds, clouds of pale pink and ivory rising up against the rain-dark trees and the pale stone of the university buildings. The beauties of the season pass so quickly, it seems as though we barely glimpse them before they’re gone.
Yesterday and today comprise the Festival of Set, Lord of the Oasis. It’s oddly appropriate for this time of year in the northeastern United States — for, if you think about it, winter is our desert, ruled by the Lord of Storms, with the green world’s life locked away in dormant trees and frozen earth. But now the winter’s grip has (hopefully!) loosened, the rains of renewal are falling, and the land is bursting forth into brief-lived, frenetic blooms, just as the desert blooms for mere hours after its own rare rain showers. And if Set is Lord of Change, then He is there, too, in the wild and fleeting flowers, in the splitting open of the buds, in the wind-shaken cherry blossoms’ fluttering fall.
The oasis is the place of reprieve from harshness, of the irrepressible arising of life from the depths of the earth. And although it’s limited by the desert that surrounds it and by the finite length of this stage in our journey, it’s a place that we can always find and return to.
Yesterday I made offerings and sang for Set, thanking Him for sparing my house and household during the winter storms and asking Him to smile upon us for the rest of the year. May the Lord of the Oasis grant you a peaceful spring as well!
Dua Set! Nekhtet!
thehouseofvines said,
March 30, 2010 at 11:59 am
Wow. What an interesting and beautiful way to think about things