December 28, 2011
Posted in Thoughts and Reflections
at 9:22 pm
by Shefyt
This morning, sitting in shrine with Bast, I saw an image of a small tree with gnarled, twisting branches, deep, velvety-brown bark, and clusters of large, lovely white flowers. And I heard, in that soft inner voice, Would you cut the tree down just because it doesn’t grow the way you want it to?
I have a chronic tendency to want to throw everything away and start over. For many years I wanted to leave my job and go back to college, “do it right” this time, broaden my horizons, take classes in a multitude of subjects, without limiting myself to a single major. More recently, it’s manifested as a nearly frantic impulse to purge almost all of my possessions, including the house, move away someplace, and reinvent myself.
Not very practical, is it? And also, it assumes an irreparable wrongness in the way things are at present. Maybe if my life were truly toxic, if I was in an abusive relationship, or sunk in addiction, failed dreams, or despair, razing everything to the ground might be productive. But it isn’t, and I’m not. Instead, I’m truly blessed in so many ways. And if there are places that aren’t perfect, if my life in general doesn’t fit some imagined idea of perfection — so what? Finally, with a little nudge from my Mother, I think I’m okay with that.
No, I wouldn’t cut the tree down. It’s beautiful just as it is. The lean of the trunk, the jutting branches tell a story of growth and change, of the interplay of yielding and strength; the luminous flowers float like clouds against the sky. There may be room for a little judicious pruning, with love and respect for the tree’s integrity. But always in service to what’s already there. To do otherwise is to deny myself and all that’s created me as the person I am today.
Every day is Zep Tepi, the First Time of Creation. And yet, every day we start where we are. We are new, we are renewed, and we are ongoing, all at once.
Dua Kheperu! May I become.
Permalink
August 12, 2010
Posted in Festivals, Thoughts and Reflections
at 8:47 pm
by Shefyt
Today: the smell of rain on hot pavement, a blissful breath of cooler air, the hope that this long, sweltering summer might finally be drawing to a close. The House of Netjer’s New Year celebration was last week, so we’ve just entered the season of the Inundation, the rising of the great river, when a fresh surge of energy sweeps through the world and everything is washed clean and made new. Each year the House receives an oracle from Aset that provides a sort of theme for the upcoming year and also names the God or Gods Who is over that year and receives special offerings and prayers. This year is the year of Zep Tepi, the first time — the instant of creation — which belongs to all of the Gods and none of the Gods, but to make things easier for our poor human brains each season has been declared to be under the auspices of a single divinity: Ra for the first season, Mut for the second, and Mehet Weret, the cow-goddess Who embodies the primordial waters, for the third. And so the year goes from flood to flood, a perfect circle.
May it be a good year, this year of Zep Tepi, filled with prosperity and power and love. And may it bring renewal beyond anything we’ve ever dreamed of.
Di wep ronpet nofret! Nekhtet!
Permalink
December 5, 2009
Posted in Thoughts and Reflections
at 7:24 pm
by Shefyt
I’ve been feeling lately like one of those acrobats who balance spinning plates on the ends of poles. It’s challenging to keep them all in motion without dropping anything. I’ve been working on my first novel, which means that this blog lost momentum for a while. Now I have a new freelance assignment, and I also need to prepare for the Bast festival that I’ll be hosting at the shrine in a couple of weeks, plus assorted other projects, as always. At least I’m never stuck with nothing to do.
But during this last week I managed to squeeze in Senut once, for the first time in a long while. And there was so much joy in it, so much that it made my heart sing. At the center of the spinning, there is this, this — the hush of Zep Tepi in the instant before the song of creation, the perfection of the single unfolding moment.
Today is the first day of the first month of Peret, the Kemetic season known as “growing,” the time of planting and tending the fields after the influx of the floodwaters has receded. And it’s snowing here, the first reasonably serious snowfall of our New Jersey season. It seems contradictory at best to honor the growing time as we sink deeper into the darkness of winter’s short days, as the last leaves lose their grasp and fall, leaving stark branches reaching up against the snow-heavy, cloudy sky. And yet, growing doesn’t start with the first green shoots. It starts with the bare field, harrowed and plowed, with the seed pressed down into the darkness beneath the soil and left to lie there in stillness and silence, the new plant curled up within, waiting for its time.
Tonight I’ll light a candle and offer perfume and cool water to Bast, in honor of the new month. And I’ll pray for the renewal to be found in rest, and the promise of the flowering that’s to come.
Dua Bast! Nekhtet!
Permalink
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?
Permalink
February 9, 2009
Posted in Thoughts and Reflections
at 4:41 pm
by Shefyt
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.
Permalink