June 18, 2009
Posted in Being Kemetic, Netjeru, Stalking Beauty, Thoughts and Reflections
at 8:01 am
by Shefyt
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!
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March 30, 2009
Posted in Netjeru, Stalking Beauty
at 3:47 pm
by Shefyt
Starting a new effort to post daily, even if it’s just a few lines….
I finally got caught up at work, and it was a beautiful day, so I went hunting for flowers on my lunch break. And boy did I find them! Winter aconite and spring beauty, daffodils and periwinkle, magnolia and forsythia and some shrub with small, pale, drooping flowers that I couldn’t identify but that smelled amazing. And it’s still not quite April! Dua Netjer, nekhtet!
Offered blue hyacinths and white chocolate with vanilla to Bast in shrine last night, in the midst of the fierce thunderstorm that blew through at sunset. I guess this is our end of the Midwest snow storms. I didn’t realize it until this morning, but yesterday and today are a festival of Set, so I think I’ll make him an offering tonight as well.
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February 12, 2009
Posted in Creative Fire, Netjeru, The Wild Sky, Thoughts and Reflections
at 10:37 am
by Shefyt
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?
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January 8, 2009
Posted in Being Kemetic, Netjeru, Parks and Rivers, Thoughts and Reflections
at 8:15 am
by Shefyt
So as you might be able to guess from the last two posts (if the name of the blog hasn’t already given it away), rivers are almost certainly going to feature prominently here. Part of it is that I tend to experience Bast in an extremely riparian aspect. She’s not only the Lady of Fire but Lady of the Waters — Huntress among the reeds, flash of sunlight dazzling from the ripples, the breath of cool, green life lifting a scattering of waterfowl toward the sky. Some of my earliest — and still most profoundly moving — conversations with Her took place at the mouth of the Long Slip Canal in Hoboken, gazing out over the Hudson as I waited for my train to arrive, watching the intermittent birds and the sunset’s reflection burning across the glass-windowed face of Manhattan and the slow wavelets lapping at the abandoned pilings, and asking, “Why Egypt?”
Because everywhere is Egypt, She said to me. Everywhere the ducks fly, everywhere the water flows, everywhere the sun’s light falls.
I’ve been trying to think of a word for what the river means to me. Metaphor isn’t quite it, although it does partake of metaphor. I’ve used the river before as an image to describe my conception of Netjer, the fluid, often arbitrarily demarcated boundaries that on another level blend into unity, not just tributaries flowing into a larger watercourse but the entirety of the river basin and all that it contains. (A shift in perception: Is the slow, weed-choked widening in the stream separate from the satin-slick surge of current where the channel suddenly narrows? Where does one state transition into the next? And would the river be the same without the shape of the hillsides that funnel runoff into it, or the species that live within and around it, or the wind patterns that bring the rain? And yet you can point at the river, naming it as a singular entity, and doing so is both informative and useful.) The river is connection, like the image of the world-and-heavens-spanning Tree that it’s branching structure reflects; it’s journey, and in that it’s also life in the sense of arising, passing through different states and environments, and merging at last into an unfathomable depth, or else evaporating into the sky. It’s life as well in that its waters sustain the life around it, life in that it cradles and contains life within it.
I live now — and have lived for nearly all of my life — in a watershed valley. The brook that cuts across my property flows into a stream that feeds the North Branch of the Raritan and thus the Raritan itself, and ultimately ends in Raritan Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, if it can be said to ever truly end. I grew up playing by streamsides, and so I guess the sound and movement of the water got into me early. And the colors — fierce green of the tender new grass around a tiny spring-fed trickle, early in the year before the fields have really come back; mellow amber of the sun’s light on the rounded, leaf-shrouded stones of the river bottom; slatey or silvery or midnight blue flashes where the water’s surface captures the sky. So to me the centrality of the river to the world of Kemet, the way that Egypt and the Nile define each other, is an important point of personal congruence, a resonance that makes me feel at home.
One of Bast’s more obscure epithets is Shet, She of the Pool, and that’s one of the many faces of Her joy: the coolness, the lightness, the vivid sensation, the liquid shiver of delight. And I could probably go on and on at great length about where and how this aspect merges into some of Her other ones — Eye of Ra, Lady of the Perfume Jar, nurse and protector of the King, Firstborn of Tem — but that’s probably better suited for a book (someday!) than for the blog.
What lifts me up? I echoed in my last post.
She does.
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