December 27, 2011

Purity and priority

Posted in Home and Temple, Tending the Shrine, Thoughts and Reflections at 9:28 pm by

I’m a little bit tired today; it was a slow, rough, frustrating day at work. Fortunately my festival calendar is clear until the end of the week. Or perhaps not so fortunately after all. Some festivity might rejuvenate me. Well, instead here I sit with a peppermint hot chocolate and two sleeping cats being ridiculously adorable as I try to put some words together in meaningful patterns. There are much worse ways to spend a rainy evening.

I’ve put in my request to be reinstated as a W’ab priest of the House of Netjer, and while I wait for official confirmation I’ve been continuing to sit with my thoughts and feelings about the job, as well as with my goals and priorities for my life in general. I think I’ve finally managed to set aside the pages-long list of things I think I want to do, or should do, or that might be cool to do if twenty thousand equally cool-seeming things weren’t jostling for my attention and energy. I have myself down to just four general categories now: priest work, relationships, writing, and care of self and home. Of course, each of those by itself is infinitely expandable. The secret is going to be to keep balance among them, and also to hold onto that simplicity of focus when the next shiny distraction comes along.

I had a dream a few nights ago that I was at some sort of convention or fair, and I found this amazing wolf pelt on a table of hides. (In the dream it was identified as “coyote,” but recalling it, it seems too large and heavy-furred to be anything other than a wolf.) It was pale silver-grey and white, and it glittered as though tiny fragments of mirrors had been stitched to it like sequins. I woke up briefly, and when I went back to sleep I was trying on the wolf pelt in front of a mirror, pulling the head down over my face. I made a singularly unconvincing wolf.

I think it comes back to the question of what is and isn’t my work, and acknowledging that just because something may seem beautiful and wonder-filled and intriguing doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a good fit. (In fact, the dream came just as I was on the verge of chasing down one of those enticing rabbit trails.) I’m still figuring out what the right fit actually is, but I think I’m circling in on it. Or at least drawing the circle to exclude what it isn’t.

I walked into work this morning and found my dictionary open to the word “purity.” In shrine one time I received the message Purity is priority. Not only that purity is a priority for a W’ab priest, but that purity lives in what we set as our priorities. What we keep foremost in our hearts.

May I be pure.

December 31, 2010

Cleansings

Posted in Home and Temple, Parks and Rivers at 12:31 pm by

I haven’t been getting outside enough lately — between one thing and another, I’ve been spending far too much time glued to the computer (she says, writing in her blog). And for all the beauty to be seen and appreciated while I’m out driving, it’s really not the same. Yesterday I finally had a chance to rectify that, as I took a break from cleaning out and reorganizing my desk drawers to take a walk down to the river meadow just as the sun was setting.

And I could feel the shift as I stepped off the road and onto the winter grass, like the release of a vast sigh. Walking on the damp but still frozen ground, breathing in the cold, snowmelt-flavored air, touching the airy grace of the taller, plumed grasses and the catkin-tipped branches, listening to the fluid murmur of the river as it purled over stones and welled up through holes in the ice — it was a different kind of cleansing, a purification, and one that was very much needed. The river brings renewal, as it always does, washing against and cooling the heart; the light-struck sky brings peace, uplifting the spirit. And home ground underneath one’s feet brings stability, a sense of center that feeds the ka.

From tending the home to being tended by the home, from restoring order to being restored: the cycle of give-and-take continues.

O Netjer, may I remember and return, again and again, to Your wellsprings of life.

June 16, 2010

Bathrooms for Bast

Posted in Being Kemetic, Home and Temple at 11:07 pm by

Yesterday morning, I heard my Mother’s voice for the first time.

Usually when I “hear” Bast, what comes through is an impulse or a knowing that immediately is translated into words inside my head by what I call the “Bast voice,” which is not unlike the inner voices that belong to my various fiction characters. While this translation certainly helps my understanding, it can also be deceptive — sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether something is really Bast or is instead some part of myself.

On Tuesday I finally took a genuine first step toward getting some major home repairs and maintenance issues taken care of. The impression I got in shrine that night was that Bast was extremely pleased by this; in fact, She wanted some sistrum shaking to celebrate it. Later I also had a very striking dream that featured some powerful household protection imagery.

Yesterday morning, I was reflecting again on tending my home as part of my service to my Mother — on the true significance of it, when the shrine itself is considered to be the house of God. And a voice rolled through my head that was emphatically not mine:

I am there.

I wish I could describe that voice to you, but the memory of it has already blurred. I only remember that it was beautiful and resonant, that it was nothing like I would have imagined Bast to sound like, but at the same time it was utterly perfect for Her.

It’s funny — I’m so drawn to the mystical, the mythical, the poetic, and what does Bast want from me? A bathroom remodel. Well, to be more serious, there are a number of potential health and environmental issues that we’ll also be addressing: critters in the attic, potential mold inside the walls, an aging underground oil tank. On a level of practicing purity and living in ma’at, Bast’s engagement in all of this makes total sense. I still never quite expect God to be so pragmatic, though. And it was just as unexpected to hear Her speak at last, a moment of astonishment and wonder that I think will linger with me for a long time.

Dua Netjer! Dua Bast! Nekhtet!

March 23, 2010

Making ready the Door of the Sun

Posted in Being Kemetic, Festivals, Home and Temple at 9:35 pm by

Last weekend was the spring equinox, and the weather was absolutely beautiful, so I spent a large chunk of time outside…doing yard work. (Which I actually do enjoy, although right now I have more tasks than I do energy.) At any rate, my plan on Saturday was to begin by picking up some pine cones out the back, and then move on to clearing up around the driveway. So I picked up cones and raked up pine needles and raked out a lot of old, dead grass, and over an hour later, I found myself asking, “Why am I still working on this one slope at the back of the house, instead of giving more attention to the front areas?”

And a few minutes later, I realized, “…oh. It’s because this is ‘the Door of the Sun,’ where I sometimes stand to salute Bast and Atum at sunset, especially during the lighter months of the year.” And thus reminded, on Sunday evening I did just that, acknowledging the next tick of the year’s clock and the ending of the Feast of Zep Tepi, to the trills of spring peepers and evening bird songs — adding in Heru-hekenu for the first time, to honor the full holy triad of per-Bast.

The Gods have a way of reordering one’s priorities.

October 19, 2009

Walking the valley

Posted in Home and Temple, On Writing, The Wild Sky, Thoughts and Reflections at 4:43 pm by

On Sunday I went for a walk down the road and around the school, the first time in a long while that I’ve taken that particular walk. I often go for similar walks on my lunch break at work, around the university campus, down by the lake or along the canal, but they don’t have the sense of exhilaration that yesterday’s walk did. Was it something in the wind? Or was it because it was that wind, gusting down the length of the valley, that sky arching overhead, from hillside to hillside, that roll of the land and the rivers, the scattering of orange leaves like a drift of fire on the hill leading up to the cow farm’s main house, the pines along the athletic fields swaying against the ragged and illuminated clouds? Because it felt like coming home?

I’d never even realized that I’d been away, and yet, in some sense, I was. And is it a coincidence that I also spent much of the day writing, something that I’d been too busy or too anxious to do for a long time? There are a lot of distractions, a lot of ways to be absent to one’s self and one’s life.

O Netjer, may I be truly present. May I live. May I live.