I had a rather odd encounter in a meditation last night. But I think you need the background to really understand it.

Not quite a year ago, I took Kali up on a promise she’d offered me: she would wield her axe on my behalf if I chose the target wisely. I had sat on that promise more than a year before being ready to choose, not sure that I was wise enough to make that leap, or strong enough to accept the consequences. In that time I spent waiting, I got to know her better, left libations for her, and came to something of a working arrangement. And when the time was right and the need was great, I asked for something I couldn’t have gotten to easily without divine intervention: a lack of fear.

Not that I’m not still afraid from time to time, but what I got out of this request was a profound diminishing of unjustified unreasonable fears, and a better grip on the difference between things that are worth being afraid of and those that are not.

Was it a wise choice? I’m still not sure, but I think it’s better that I’ve made the choice than not.

Over the last few months, with the growing baby in my womb foremost in my thoughts,  I had felt somewhat of a distancing from Kali, and from the Gods in general. Not that they weren’t there, but that they were taking a step back to let me ponder things in my own time. And for a while there, I wondered if Kali was going to let me go completely.

When things got a bit rocky with the pregnancy, I remembered a story I’d read about her - unborn children were often offered to her for safekeeping; she’d either see them survive and flourish or take them as her own in death. A fitting request for me to make then, since she had played a hand in me getting pregnant to begin with. But still I felt a distance.

When we did the reiki workshop, one of the other girls came out of a practice session with a message for me: Hera had once been the Goddess  people prayed to for children, and some of her priestesses had been given the gift of bestowing the blessing of a child on women. If I wanted this gift, I should work with Hera and ask her for it.

Hera has never been much on my radar screen. I thought the timing was interesting, given the seeming distance growing between Kali and I, and that maybe it was time to move on and grow in a new direction. I even started running across articles on Hera here and there as I worked my way through the backlog of magazines at our house.

This weekend I ended up back in the hospital, and it appears that, barely 6 months pregnant, we’ll be staying here until the baby is born due to the continuing complications. Lots of rest, and lots of meditation have been the order of the week, trying to keep blood pressures down (or at least stable and treatable, since I’m now on two separate meds, and the key factor on my side is that as long as the BP is manageable, the baby stays in unless she shows signs of distress).

At any rate,  it’s been a rough few days, and the clarity of what to be afraid of and what to let go has been a blessing - although the things that don’t involve fear are harder to erase, like, “what did we do wrong?” and “why do so many good things in life get ruined?”

Meditating on those last night, I found myself in my hospital room. Arianrhod, who has always been beside me on my journey sat on my bed, holding my hand and comforting me. Kali stood between me and the door, sword and axe drawn, looking rather vicious, in a very obvious “guard” stance. She stepped aside to reveal that the door now had a window, and knocking on the door looking in was Hera, looking regal and composed, waiting to be let into the room.

I was a bit taken aback by this, and Kali looked at me and said, very plainly, “Maybe you should ask her what you get out of this deal. What has she done for you that makes her worthy of your honor?” I looked at Hera intently, and there was no answer. I looked at Kali, trying to understand her motives.

And then life interrupted as the real-world door opened,  snapping me back to reality.

I don’t quite know what to think of this all at this point. It will take some thinking to figure out where to go with it, and what to do about Hera.

Maybe my Gods seem far away because I’ve been in such an odd spot, sort of backed into my own little corner,  not paying much attentionEn el http://www.pokeramor.es/en-linea-online-poker-habitaciones.html game, los jugadores juegan en linea, que significa que todos los jugadores usan el Internet para jugar y el juego se mantiene en una realidad virtual en las salas del poquer virtual. to anything else while I dealt with life here in my immediate sphere. And it’s hard to say, but maybe this suggests that I should learn more about Hera before I jump in with both feet, more the way I did with Kali - Kali is still here as guard and guide; certainly that strength is something I need right now. But over the next few weeks, there is plenty of time to ponder the situation, since I’m officially on medical leave for the duration.

It occurred to me this weekend why there’s such a clamoring for “more advanced” books. Yes, it’s partly because there are so many books for beginners, or near-beginners, and not a lot beyond that. But I think a bigger problem is that after a few years, we get stuck in this sort of mid-life crisis mode. 

Merriam-Webster (via dictionary.com) [1] says a mid-life crisis is “a period of emotional turmoil in middle age caused by the realization that one is no longer young and characterized especially by a strong desire for change.” And that captures a big part of it. We’re not newbies, we want to move forward, and we don’t know what to change or how to change, but something should change, because we’re more experienced now.

I realized that this is the root of the problem while taking a Reiki II class this weekend. While the instructors are competent and knowledgeable, I felt that I got very little new information out of the weekend. Energy work is energy work, guided meditations are guided meditations, and “energy exercises” are just modified (and somewhat non-sensical)  t’ai chi/qigong type exercises, and from my experience, the real thing has a lot more energy, especially when movements are done one after the other as a flow (and that flow teaches more about energy flow than any single exercise could) than the modified versions.

Maybe I would have felt different about this 8 or 10 years ago, before I had the understanding of energy work that I do now; before I’d had experiences that take things well beyond what we were learning in this class.

But the question remains: where do I go from here? I’m not a rank beginner, and haven’t been in a long while. I’m relatively comfortable in my practice, but looking for something deeper.  It’s like you start out on a path of stepping stones across a lake, and in the beginning, they’re close together, and as you learn more, each successive stone is a little farther away, until you get to a point where you’ll have to jump if you want to reach that next one without getting wet.

In modern American society, when you want to learn something, you find a book or a class or a seminar of some sort, and come out of it with some new insight. So, we go looking for those familiar forms.

However, we’re also talking about a mystery religion - a religion of experience. Books on these sorts of experiences are hard to write, since so much is just not explainable. There aren’t even all that many books that say, “this is what I did, I got something out of it, maybe you will too,” books out there, so it’s hard to know where to go first.

Most classes and seminars held at local shops (and even those at the few festivals I’ve been to) tend to either be introductory in nature (e.g., Wicca 101, Intro to Crystals, Basics of Runes) , or skill-based (e.g., make your own ritual clothing, how to make jewelry). So much so, that most of the time, there are few workshops that even sound interesting to me.

Maybe there are other festivals with more experiential workshops - if there are, they’re mostly too far for me to manage attending any time soon.

Reiki at least was a specific skillset that I didn’t have…and yet, much of what we did, I already knew, having figured it out on my own and then moved on a while back.

So, where does that leave us? I suspect it leaves us still trying to figure out how to reach that next stepping stone on the path without falling and hurting ourselves in the process. And maybe the real trick here is to jump off the stepping stones all together, and swim around a bit until we reach a dry spot.

[1] mid-life crisis. (n.d.). Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary. Retrieved May 28, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: компютриhttp://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mid-life crisis

For the last couple of years, I’ve been leaving my libations and offerings in the back corner of our yard - particularly full moon and dark moon offerings, but others as the mood strikes me. It’s piled with large landscaping rocks, and we’ve always left it to grow somewhat wild - though the fire pit is only there because the lawn care crew moved it out of their way:

When we first moved here, the yard was mostly just dirt and rock. Up near the fence line at the front of the house, there are violets - and they’ve stayed there, until this year, when suddenly we had a whole bunch of them here in my offering corner - and while it’s possible they’ve spread the last few years all the way along the side fence, there were virtually no blooms along there this past month - just the cluster at the front of the house, and the cluster back here.

I’m taking this as a good sign, among several others, that the offerings have been accepted and are much appreciated. This is one of two spots in the yard that I think really need some sort of statue or other symbol of the gods, I just haven’t quite figured out what yet.

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear–not absence of fear. ”

–Mark Twain

I’ve been rather quiet this month. Life has been busy, there’ve been hard choices to make, and I really just needed time to do some internal processing about all the changes going on.

The benefit of a daily practice is that once it becomes ingrained, you tend to do it anyway, even when life falls apart around you. And so my daily reiki and prayers continue to be my way to wind down in the evenings, as I try to bring a  little more peace and order into what’s become chaos.

The last year has been a year of changes - of learning to overcome fear to make the changes that need to be made, and to have the strength to stand behind those decisions. This month’s decision: The business largely needs to go, because it takes up all our time, and we’re going to need that time for the baby. This was a really hard choice, since I’ve long seen this business as something spiritually important to me. But it’s time to move on to other things.

A friend recently complained that he feels like he’s from no where - all the places important to his childhood are, one by one, disappearing, and it seems to be leaving him feeling adrift and alone.

I’ve been in his shoes; but I’ve found it much better to build on my own internal strength. I have found my place, and made it my own, and no matter what happens to the things surrounding my life, I have a place to go home to, because it’s here in my head and my heart.

There is peace to be found in our daily rituals, and strength in our faith. Fear may still find us from time to time, but by planting our own roots, and letting them grow deep and strong in our faith and our rituals, we have the strength to master the fear, do what we need to do, and improve our lives.

Last Friday, I went to my first “group” full moon ritual (actually, my first group ritual of any sort) in over a year.

Between my initiation at Imbolc last year, and the directions my coven was heading at the time, I felt I needed a break to get my own house in order before continuing with that group, much less any group. I’ve done ritual by myself for nearly every full moon and new moon since, but a recent invitation to attend this ritual (and to keep attending if I so choose) was too good to pass up, especially coming nearly a year to the day after committing to a year away from group ritual.

The nice thing about this particular ritual was that it was hosted by my upline - the teachers of my now former high priestess. Most of the women there were people I’d circled with before - and because most of the group consisted of old friends, news of my pregnancy was met with hugs and smiles and love.  It was maybe the most truely Dianic ritual I’d been to for some time before my sabbatical. The two hostesses are older women - partners, grandmothers - and they’ve been at this a long, long time.

While solitary ritual has it’s place…group ritual is good too. Dianic rituals have a feel of bounded chaos, because you never really know what the woman standing next to you or across from you will decide to do; what particular flavor of energy she will call on or bring to the rite, what words or images she will evoke, and where they will take you. And while this ritual had no meditation…I didn’t miss it either. It had connections between people, and a joyful energy that sang through the group, raising both the good and bad of life up as signs that we still live. There was energy drawn for healing - healing for one of the hostesses who has some major complications from chronic illness, healing of stress and angst, and a lot of energy for me and the baby, which brought a lot of joy to all those present. It was a place where this pregnancy could be celebrated without diminishing the times I’ve sat in circle, surrounded by some of these same women, and wept over the journey of infertility - a very healing, very needed experience for me.

I should point out that pregnancy has been quite the spiritual experience for me thus far overall. Mindfulness of the current moment has been a big lesson here - pregnancy changes day by day, so no two days are the same, and it’s made me more attentive to the rest of life around me, and how it too must be savored right now, because the next minute is a different one to savor before it too is gone.

Pregnancy has also become a source of a deeper faith - I received what I was promised, which makes my trust just that much stronger, and I have a new understanding of my primary matron, Arianrhod. I once rejected her because she was just a fertility goddess, then I embraced the fact that she was so much more…and now I see it all from a different perspective, which both blends those two understandings, and invalidates them at the same time. Embracing her as “more” than a mother goddess invalidates that facet of her, just as dismissing her as “just” a fertility goddess invalidated the rest of her.

One of our hostesses drew down the moon, which is something I’d never actually seen done in a group setting, and never really attempted myself. But the experience…was fascinating, and wonderful, and I spent the whole ritual feeling the moon riding point on our journey. One interesting experience as part of drawing down the moon was *feeling* the moon filling me, filling my growing belly, taking that light and reflecting it through me, and incorporating itself into me. Having not done this while not pregnant, it’s hard to say how it would differ, but each part I played in the ritual had a similar effect - a connection I had not really felt before opened up to me. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention before, or maybe I just wasn’t reaching out and grabbing hold of that thread - or maybe it really wasn’t there before. But it’s definitely there now.

At any rate, I think I’m back on the bandwagon when it comes to women’s circles for the full moon, and plan to go circle with them as frequently as is practical. The drive isn’t any worse than any of the various incarnations of my previous coven. The connections are an important part of the energy involved, and community, in some form, is an important part of any spiritual practice. I will most likely still do new moons by myself - it’s a different energy, and one that strikes me as more suited to personal development and personal pursuits.