Of Paths and Frustrations

It's been a long week. I did lots of things, although more of them were things happening in my head than out of it. I drove around in the country a lot (I am lucky enough to live 20 mins drive from some of the loveliest countryside in Britain). I got rained on a lot (well, this is England). There was a bit more ritual. There were a LOT more books (I will never get through them). I did obscene amounts of meditating and thinking. I had a week-long migraine. And some nice people came to tidy up my garden (it looks lovely now, but I'm nervous of the enormous black spiders that are *everywhere*. But I'll get over it. Probably).

I've been meaning to blog my thoughts as they've been happening, but I kept running out of time and/or falling asleep all over the place - thanks, migraines! I've started following some exercises, as I realised I needed structure fast, before my head blew off. Accordingly I'm doing bits and pieces of very useful things, including lots of the exercises in this book, which is philosophical, practical and really interesting (and I can't wait to start this one by the same authors).

Towards the beginning of the week I was drowning in entirely misplaced guilt and a sense of a betrayal of lifelong values. That's passing now, but I'm sure there'll be more of that to come. The reason it's improved for now, I think, is that I keep making myself remember that my spiritual path is just that - my spiritual path. Furthermore, anyone who would keep me from it is keeping me from serving the Divine, and that's not so good. (I so want to have a Bible verse that would work as a good metaphor for that, but all the ones I'm thinking of don't quite work, so I'll just pretend I cited a really good one. Something cutting and radical and inclusive.) Anyway. For right now, the most important thing is that find my path - that I don't have another experience of making myself shut up to fit what's expected of me, which is so harmful. Especially when, whatever it's calling me to, I believe the Divine is calling.

Equally, I know that in order to explore my path, I have to do, rather than just think. This is what Fire Lyte and Velma of the 'Inciting a BrewHaHa' podcast call "Doing the stuff"! It's really simple, but really scary. I've done enough reading in the past few months to know that, if I really want to understand new ways of encountering the Divine, I have to try and damn well encounter it. This is scary, not least because my Angel (who's been away for a couple of weeks) is coming home soon, and while it's been easy enough during the past few weeks to get up at dawn to do a ritual honouring a dawn goddess (I went back to bed after), that kind of thing will get harder when there's someone else in the house. The reason I can't tell her too much at the moment is that it's hurting her when I do. I'll say more some other time about the reasons for that (or maybe I'll keep it between the two of us). Suffice it to say that with her, I need to take things a little bit slowly. Which is fine. I'll work stuff out - given time!

The latter part of the week has had more frustrations in it than exploration. There has been a lot of rain, during the one week I had set aside to hang out in the countryside. I have started realising just how difficult it is to do anything practical when all the local classes, meets and so on seem to be in inaccessible places. (The witchy shop where I asked if there was any possibility that in the future they might have workshops in a not-upstairs venue, and was basically told I was asking too much, made me sad. But I'm sure more accessible possibilities will make themselves known when I'm ready.) And I've had too insane of a migraine to do quite as much reading as I was hoping to do. Again, it's all fine - there are other times! Even if I am feeling an uncharacteristic case of back-to-school nerves at the moment. (I'm a PhD-doing TA-type-person, which is why that's funny.)

But it's all going to be fine. (Which, you may have noticed, is my mantra.)

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In slightly less complicated things, I'm working on visualisation (something I find very difficult) to help make sense of things. I saw a well and a raven (possibly a crow) in a visualisation last night. Fun! Um, I mean, cool. Um... yeah, I'm not good at taking this stuff too seriously. It *is* all fun, as well as other deep things. And that's fine with me!

And I'm going to bed now, as I'm still sooooo tired. Also I want to finish listening to the 'Inciting a Riot' podcast, which I've been waiting for all week. Nighty-night.


We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves back to the Garden...
- Joni Mitchell, 'Woodstock'