December 27, 2009
Posted in Being Kemetic, Festivals, Ten Days of Joy, Thoughts and Reflections
at 9:59 pm
by Shefyt
A major part of the process of settling and growing in Kemetic religion is figuring out one’s calendar. With some hundreds of known festivals filling almost every day of the year, it can be entirely overwhelming! Most people seem to prune it down to a handful of focused observances, with at best a quick candle lighting or a moment of prayer to acknowledge some of the other days.
The festival known as Bast Guards the Two Lands (sometimes called Bast Guides the Two Lands) is one of my big ones, and this year it was even more of a production than usual, with the Northeast gathering on one weekend, my own personal observance on the following Friday, and the Ten Days of Joy meditations spanning both. It included fellowship, singing, the decoration and shaking of sistra, the lighting of candles, offerings of chocolate and flowers and cookies and oranges and roast duck (among other things), long bouts of contemplation, a renewed sense of purity and the beginnings of a shift in spiritual focus, and through it all, the overpowering warmth and presence of my Mother’s love.
Six years ago, I celebrated this festival for the very first time, although I didn’t realize it then. It was a time of deep reflection, as it still is today, a time of sitting in darkness and opening to the light, a time of stillness and profound listening. And yet it’s also a festival of song and rejoicing, of group celebration and festivity, of laughter. It was interesting to me that the Ten Days of Joy also seemed to swing between stillness and exuberance, inward and outward, contemplation and action. Perhaps one could say that joy and love both reconcile all opposites.
Praise to You, Bast, pre-eminent in the field of the god! Mistress of Heaven, O Peerless One, Firstborn of Tem! May You guide us, may You guard us, in every day and every hour, as You guide and guard the Two Lands! Nekhtet!
(The picture above is from after the group celebration, when everyone else had left and our burned-down celebrant candles were removed from the bowl of sand, leaving just Bast’s central candle in place.)
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October 23, 2009
Posted in Friday Findings
at 12:11 pm
by Shefyt
This is an interesting piece. The museum’s Web page says that it’s a triad including Bast, while the label in the photo calls it “Seated Figures of Bast.” Is it Bast and two other lionness-headed Goddesses? And if so, who are They? Or is it supposed to be three different manifestations of Bast? Or, since three in Kemetic thought is the number of indefinite multiplicity, was this piece intended to signify Bast in all Her forms? Mysteries, mysteries….
(Click the image to go to the museum’s site, where you can view a larger version of the photo.)
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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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September 25, 2009
Posted in Parks and Rivers, Thoughts and Reflections
at 9:47 am
by Shefyt
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.
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September 17, 2009
Posted in Stalking Beauty, The Wild Sky, Thoughts and Reflections
at 9:37 pm
by Shefyt
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!
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June 30, 2009
Posted in Being Kemetic, Thoughts and Reflections
at 3:18 pm
by Shefyt
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.
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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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