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 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.