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!
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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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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.
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