November 8, 2010

Ripples on the flood

Posted in Thoughts and Reflections at 8:34 pm by

A night of stars, multitudinous and bright in the clear, edge-of-winter sky, with the new moon’s crescent long set — a morning of soft, cloud-swirled sky, of white dandelion seedheads above the frosted grass. Early today, on the drive to work, the veiled sun shone through a curtain of thinning leaves, stirred by the wind into a rippling shimmer like light on water; later, the clouds came in for real, a low, muffling, pale gray blanket, bringing with them the rain. The last month of the Inundation is upon us, the final sweeping-clear before we settle into the dark, inward-focused season of Growing. Soon the Mysteries of Wesir will take place, the lamentations for the slain God Who becomes Lord of the Duat, the Otherworld that receives both the Night Boat of the Ra and the souls of the dead.

My housemate and I have been letting go of unneeded things — threadbare socks, cassette tapes too long unlistened to, more yarn than anyone knows what to do with — and preparing for the much-anticipated bathroom remodel to finally take place. A time of inventory, I suppose. What kind of space do we need to make in our lives? What do we need to carry forward with us? Who will we be when we emerge with the seeds in spring — more to the point, who are we right now, and what potential lies curled within us? How do we live out our becoming every day, in every moment of zep tepi?

Sometimes I find myself caught between identities, wishing for just a single focus: to give myself entirely to being a writer, or to the priest work, or simply to the needs of living and tending my home. But whenever I try to set myself to sweep everything away but that one focus, to clear the ground, I can’t seem to let go of the rest. So out of the great flood of life I catch a gleam of words, a riffle of Presence, a water-smoothed pebble for the garden. Is it enough? I’m not quite sure. But I think that it may have to be.

One of my temple goals for the last couple of months has been forgiveness — forgiveness whenever I’m made iritated or impatient by something, and primarily forgiveness for myself, all those times when I rage against myself for not accomplishing more, for being held back by fear or uncertainty, distraction or confusion. Rage is good at tearing down, but not so adept at fitting together. Forgiveness, then; a breath of patience, a moment of stillness, before I return to stringing together these varied, many-colored beads of my days.

O Netjer, show me how to assemble my pieces. May I be whole.

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!