October 12, 2009
Posted in Tending the Shrine, Thoughts and Reflections
at 2:45 pm
by Shefyt
Sometimes when life seems too busy, when it seems as though there’s so much to do and so few hours in which to do it, this anxious and rebellious small voice pipes up to protest spending time in shrine. So it was at the end of last week. I was sitting before Bast’s icon, having just come to grips with the fact that I’ve been letting resistance get the better of me lately and that I need to put more conscious effort into all the many facets of tending the shrine. Somewhat plaintively, that inner voice blurted out, “Does that mean I’m supposed to live my life in the shrine?”
No, Bast replied.
Live your life from here.
Begin it here and end it here.
Trust a God to turn your perspective sideways. Consider the difference between spirituality that takes the place of day-to-day life and spirituality as a ground and context from which that life arises, between ritual as obligation and burden, something that consumes you, and ritual as source of renewal, that which gives life and energy, and as a source of rest. Like a home that you go out from every day and to which you return, again and again…that’s the distinction I need to embrace, as a palliative against that resistance, which ultimately arises from nothing more than a mind clouded by tension and fear.
So for the present I have a new practice, where every day I go to my shrine as the first thing when I get up and as the last thing before I go to bed. It only needs to be for a few moments, just long enough to calm myself, to remind myself, to center myself by touching that wellspring of life. We’ll see what comes of it.
Dua Netjer! Dua Bast! Nekhtet!
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June 10, 2009
Posted in Tending the Shrine, Thoughts and Reflections
at 2:20 pm
by Shefyt
The temptation is very strong to delete the first line of the previous post, considering how embarrassingly I’ve failed to live up to that aim. But that would be sort of dishonest, so I’ll leave it. At any rate, I got lost again, which is always so confusing, because when I’m most lost it always seems as though there’s someplace else I ought to be, and it’s not here — it’s anywhere but here — and I go frantic trying to answer that call…but it’s only when I stop looking for the place where I “should” be that I stop feeling lost and instead begin to feel at peace. You’d think that I’d learn after the third or fourth or tenth time. And it all sounds so simple and obvious when I write it like this, but when I’m in the throes of that desperation all I can think of is escape.
I thought that I wanted a writer’s hermitage, spare and clean and far away, all twilight and simplicity. And when the dust settled, I looked around and realized how much I’ve been neglecting the home that I have now, the place of my shrine, that I dreamed of making beautiful for Bast. Those are the two poles that keep pulling at me — far flight into the abstract and remote, and settling into the specificity of honoring the place where I am. But it’s not really as simple as a straightforward polarity. I need to balance both, to thread them through each other, warp and weft.
Two weekends ago, finally in recovery after a long stretch of the crazy, I took on some very overdue yardwork, cutting back the multiflora roses and mowing the trails to the brush piles. As I worked, I pledged to Bast that I would reclaim the overgrown and weed-choked places, that I’d make this land her well-loved temple after all. And in the days following that — the songs! Suddenly the floodgates opened, new songs began to pour through, and old songs in progress leaped closer to being done. Clearly this was a step down a good path, or at the very least a creative one.
Dua Netjer, Dua Bast! Nekhtet!
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