September 25, 2009

Lakeside thoughts

Posted in Parks and Rivers, Thoughts and Reflections at 9:47 am by

I went down to the lake at lunchtime yesterday, to sit and watch the reflections of the willows, the sun, and the passing clouds, to drop leaves into the water and watch them turn in the slow, eddying currents.

Sometimes patience is so hard. Taking time is so hard. It seems as if it should be easy, just living, just letting things come. I know that there are ways to rest, even while in motion, but somehow, far too often, I don’t.

This week has been about finding that rest: playing with the new kittens, sitting and reading in the evenings (more pleasure reading than I’ve done all summer!), doing the one thing that just has to be done each day. This week has been about kindness to myself. And I think I’m starting to feel the fruits of that kindness: a little more clarity, the feeling that I might be able to start writing in earnest again.

Tonight I’ll pour water for Khonsu, beneath the waxing moon, and for the Seven Arrows of Bast, in thanks and in prayer.

Dua Khonsu! O Shining One, Great Healer, may You watch over me.

Dua Bast! Beautiful Mother, may I rest peacefully in Your embrace.

September 23, 2009

Opet, Year 17

Posted in Festivals, The Wild Sky, Thoughts and Reflections at 12:34 pm by

Out of the overcast day, a moment of sun — brilliant white clouds pull together like slow Symplegades, thin swirls of cirrus curling between them like the spray of waves against stone. They kiss, and gray shadow falls again.

We’re in the midst of Opet, the festival of the Theban triad, celebrating the union of Amun and Mut, the bright promise of Their son Khonsu, and the renewal of the sacred kingship. Where the Lord of Thrones meets the Lady of the Crowns, where the hidden meets the manifest, where the Divine and the human worlds touch, we are in neheh, cyclical time, the spiral of becoming. The play of light waxes and wanes. But there will always be healing.

Dua Amun! Dua Mut! Dua Khonsu! Nekhtet!

September 17, 2009

What I want

Posted in Stalking Beauty, The Wild Sky, Thoughts and Reflections at 9:37 pm by

Wep Ronpet is well past, and the season of the Inundation is underway. The golden rain trees around the fountain plaza are starting to turn, shedding their first delicate yellow leaves, living up to their name. This morning was wrapped in gray, a promise of drizzle, a heavy overcast that intensified even the smallest spots of color: blue chicory by the roadside, a fiery clump of tickseed sunflowers, one prematurely red maple branch. The rumor of autumn is in the wind, breath of coolness and change, ready to sweep everything clean before it, opening the way for all possibility.

Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time caught up in a looping pattern of anxiety, one of the most frequent manifestations of which has been a circular inner monologue: “I want something. What do I want? I don’t know what I want! But I want something….” This week I was finally able to put on the brakes by means of a very simple, basic affirmation technique: taking the negative statement at the heart of that distress, turning it into a positive one, and repeating it with intention, like a mantra.

I know what I want.
I know what I want.
I know what I want.

And the answers came.

I want to be strong.
What does it mean to be strong?
To be whole and sound. To be effective in the world.

I want to move through life with grace.
What does it mean to be graceful?
To be centered in myself. To be conscious, as I move, of my relationship with all that’s around me.

I want to live in beauty.
What does it mean to live in beauty?
To be aware. To discover richness and sweetness with all of my senses, every day, everywhere. To choose always the beautiful and the true.

I want to create beauty.
What does it mean to create beauty?
To use all my talents to write, to sing, to make things that are lovely and satisfying. To “share your lapis,” as I was told once in an inner journey. To make the world a little brighter, to make life a little easier and happier for everyone around me. To reflect all of the beauty that I see and experience and imagine.

Everything else? All the passing flickers of interests, obsessions, the one-true-goals, the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-times? It’s all window dressing, all veils and curtains, all outward forms that come and go. The essence is what’s deep and true. So if I can stay with and follow that essence, and worry less about the particulars, then I’ll find my way out of that endless loop at last.

– –

And then, having realized that, today I went out for a walk at lunchtime and sat for a while on a set of abandoned steps, watching the cloud-blown sky. And all at once the next key came to me: part of the urgency that lies behind my anxiety is this feeling I sometimes get of being filled with a tremendous energy and having no idea what to do with it. There’s a desperation to find something big and important and most of all right, the perfect thing that I’m “meant” to do, at which I can hurl all of this gathered tension and force. (Thus the almost frantic need to answer that question of “what do I want,” to find some kind — any kind — of direction and purpose.) And what the wind and my Mother told me is — that it’s all right to hold this energy. To contain it, as the bas jar contains the secret of its perfume. And to let it find its own expression when it’s needed, when I can see what it’s really good for — as not a single outpouring flood but a thousand subtle uses, the virtue of a thousand different resins and flowers.

Two hawks swept by overhead, flying against the wind, and the sun came out.

Dua Bast! Dua Heru-hekenu! Nekhtet!

June 30, 2009

Time and abundance, satisfaction and peace

Posted in Being Kemetic, Thoughts and Reflections at 3:18 pm by

A lot of yard work this weekend, since the weather was cooperating. Actually, the weather has been quite cooperative in general over the last week or so: rain when I need to be indoors working on a freelance assignment, sun when it’s time to work outside. (And rain again when I’ve worked more than enough and just don’t want to admit it.) Almost four hours of leaf-raking, weed-pulling, and mowing on Sunday might have been a little much, but I’m starting to feel as though order is being restored to the place, bit by bit. And I still had time enough to visit the farmers’ market, and also to stop at one of the local farms and self-pick a pint of raspberries — offering the joy of harvesting abundance on such a beautiful day to Bast, and offering the berries themselves to Her later, in shrine.

Time enough — that’s abundance too. For years, I’ve struggled under the anguish of never having enough time to accomplish everything that I want to do. I don’t suddenly have more time than I used to — more like the opposite! And in fact I didn’t get to everything on my to-do list last weekend. But I did…enough. I filled the days well, with solid work interspersed with moments of calm and rest, and had no regrets at the end of it. What I didn’t get to, I’ll get to eventually, if it’s truly important. It’s a shift in perception brings relief, at last, from anxiety: satisfaction as the focus, and with that satisfaction comes peace.

Time spent in shrine is an offering. And the way we spend our time in general — not merely what we spend it on, but how we spend it — is an offering too, one that reverts to us, just as the reversion of food and drink offerings returns their benefit to the ones who offered them. The Kemetic word hotep means “offering” — and it also means “rest,” “satisfaction,” and “peace.” The more I ran around looking for peace, the less I found it. So let peace become my offering, and my offering becomes peace in its turn.

Em hotep, Bast, em hotep.

June 18, 2009

Following the heart

Posted in Being Kemetic, Netjeru, Stalking Beauty, Thoughts and Reflections at 8:01 am by

Some time ago, in the throes of one of my periodic attacks of “What should I do with my life?!” I was sitting before Amun-Ra’s shrine. And I asked Him, “What is ma’at?” (i.e., what would be the right path for me to follow).

Go and ask your Mother, He said, adding, almost as an afterthought, Ma’at is to follow the heart.

Last weekend, I was reading from Miriam Lichtheim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature: The Late Period, and I came across the following lines, in the statue inscription of Nebneteru:

Happy is he who spends his life
In following his heart with the blessings of Amun!

In the footnotes, Lichtheim comments:

This sentence sums up the Egyptian concept of the good and blessed life. “Following the heart” (shemsu-ib) is to make the best and fullest use of what life holds: it is being active, generous, and joyful.

And I realized that I had completely misunderstood what Amun-Ra had meant by following the heart. I had thought that I should listen to the aches and pangs, that I should take the prickings of anxiety as a message, a warning, a prod to get me moving toward some other, “better” life…when instead ma’at is to listen to and to dwell in the heart’s joy in each moment. To live, to give, to create, to be open to all the good that is.

And of course, my Mother, Bast, is the Mistress of Joy.

May Bast guide my heart in its dance; may She open my eyes to the beauty everywhere around me; may She bless all that I touch and every word I speak.

Dua Netjer! Dua Bast!

June 13, 2009

Amun of the clouds

Posted in Netjeru, Stalking Beauty, The Wild Sky, Thoughts and Reflections at 8:38 am by

Driving home from work last evening, I was looking at the cumulus clouds piling high in the western sky, and they made me think of Amun — not Amun as the clouds themselves, but as the invisible wind that sculpts them into forms of exquisite beauty, the same force that lifts the heart, that inspires us to create beauty of our own.

O beautiful of plumes — dua Amun!

June 10, 2009

Renewing the pledge

Posted in Tending the Shrine, Thoughts and Reflections at 2:20 pm by

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!

February 12, 2009

Out of the tiger dawn

Posted in Creative Fire, Netjeru, The Wild Sky, Thoughts and Reflections at 10:37 am by

A wild morning — high wind; heavy clouds parting to show glimpses of the perfect clarity of the sky beyond; a delicate veil of mist across the hilltops lit up shimmering by the rising amber flame of the sun; and something in the quality of the light catching in last fall’s leaves, on the tawny grass and the bare-branched trees, so that the world took on an orange cast beneath the dark gray, sculptured sky. A tigerish morning, grrr.

The last few days have felt magical, numinous. I don’t know why. The season? The fact that I’m gearing up to work seriously on my Sau studies again? Hormones from my period? For whatever reason, everything seems possible — and then I fall back into one or more of my sludgy bad habits, until I just want to bite myself for stupidity. Zep Tepi — put down the bad, pick up the good, and start again. So here we go.

One of today’s festivals is the Procession of Nesert, flame goddess, Eye of Ra.It brings me back to the idea of fire, tigers, burning. Good old William Blake. A tiger day, or possibly a lynx day — lynx-fierce, lynx-secretive. Way back before I had really discovered Bast or begun studying Kemet, my personal pantheon included a goddess Who I knew only as the Lady of the Secret Inner Flame. I think now that She was, in fact, Bast. And Bast, of late, has been giving me tiny reminders: Take time for yourself. Be more secret. Out of the hidden, out of the inward, out of the mysterious unseen, the soul is restored to life and creativity arises, like the Bennu bird, singing.

Blue sky now, faint sunlight, and the wind a crazed tea-kettle shrieking past my window. There’s a place I want to go to at lunchtime — the top of the wooded slope looking out over the lake, a place of water and trees and stone and wind and sky, as close as I can get to hilltop or mountaintop on a half-hour walk. The path there has been closed for some kind of construction for months; I’ll have to see if it’s open today, or at least accessible. And then — who knows?

February 9, 2009

Continuity and change

Posted in Thoughts and Reflections at 4:41 pm by

One freelance assignment down, one to go.

Last week was interesting. One day was archetypally springlike, all sunwarmth and wrensong and the smell of damp earth in thaw; the next was the perfect kind of snowfall, the air thick with flakes and all the trees delicately highlighted but the roads completely clear. The day after that, brilliant clear skies above a world shrouded in the softest white, and following upon that clearing a sudden, stealthy freeze, so that getting home from my weekly gaming night turned out to be an adventure in itself.

It was good to be reminded that change can be so sudden, and that sudden change can be a source of wonder and beauty as well as threat. I have a tendency to belabor change, to blow up even the smallest shift into a major production — but in the end, who knows what the future holds? Maybe tomorrow my current circumstances will change, or I’ll change, and all the internal arguments and obstacles, no longer relevant, will slide away like sand, will melt like the snow that’s already disappeared. What will I put in their place? Because change is, always and inevitably, and yet the world goes on, and life in it goes on, and I go on and you do too — world and life and self all different day to day and yet part of a thread of being, an enduring whole.

Zep Tepi — a new day, and the world is made anew, in sun or snowfall, in stillness or song.

January 28, 2009

Putting words on the page

Posted in Being Kemetic, Thoughts and Reflections at 12:28 pm by

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!