The Song and the Flame

(I actually posted this a week or two ago, but Blogger wouldn’t cooperate and then I forgot about it… The time stamp may even reflect this, I’m not sure.)

Tim’s started going to church again. This leaves me with a bit more than an hour on Sunday mornings, which I figure can be put to use doing my own religious ritual. So this may become a weekly thing again. Yay!

I do, however, have to work on time management. I have a set amount of time between when he leaves and when Jen arrives for class (a little before Tim got home, this week) in which to accomplish my ritual. Last week, I got everything done but rushed too much. When it was time to stop rushing and start concentrating… I couldn’t. This week, I mostly balanced things out a little better, but it’s still not perfect. I finished up at a time that was late enough to make me paranoid that I wouldn’t finish getting dressed and putting stuff away and stuff before Jen arrived. I discovered that it helps if I do some of the cleaning stuff before Tim leaves. I can straighten things up the night before, even, and then clean up the bedroom and altar area while he’s showering, and only have to do basic cleaning in the bathroom after he’s gone. Wiping down the counter and mirror, sweeping the floors, and changing the towels doesn’t take long.

I’m continuing to work on refining my ritual. It currently breaks down into three basic parts: Cleansing, worship and meditation. Cleansing I’ve got fairly down pat. Clean the space, clean my body, clean my mind, clean the altar. The other two parts are a little less set.

The worship thing… I may just need to sit down and develop some sort of liturgy. The formal thing is working for me, but I still find myself groping for words and not putting them together in the way I want. It feels silly not because it’s formal, but because it’s stuck in that in-between place where it uses formal language but is still expected to be spontaneous and therefore somewhat informal. This (like so many things) requires thought, and maybe research.

Meditation I think is just a matter of practice. I have a basic method down, but I do eventually want to do more than just count breaths, and I haven’t managed that much yet. I partly want to go beyond simple breath-counting because I feel like I should be doing more, but in all honesty this is a practical thing too. It’s too easy for me to get impatient when all I’m doing is counting in-two-three, out-two-three-four-five. It’s too much a measure of time; I’m too aware that time is passing slowly. If that makes sense. I might benefit from some advice here, but I’m not sure what to even ask, so I haven’t really. And I could try reading a book, but I’m just not sure how effective learning to meditate from a book would be…

Odd trivia note… I learned this method in fifth grade, in public school. I don’t really remember why we were doing it. I remember doing a couple of guided meditations that year, though. One was in gym class, lying down, but I don’t remember how we went about that one really. (It might even have been the next year, in sixth grade. Not sure.) The other was in our classroom, at our desks. We were given this breathing pattern–in for three through the mouth, out for five through the nose. The classroom was darkened, we were told to close our eyes and just picture the things described to us. I think it involved a hot-air balloon ride starting in our own backyards. (It was difficult for me to follow because I was way too practical; our backyard had too much tree cover to allow a hot-air balloon through.) Kind of an odd thing for a public school, now I think of it. Not that I’m complaining.

Sometimes, I almost feel pulled in a recon sort of direction. It comes and goes. I’ve never quite been sure whether it’s an internal pull or an external one. Right now it’s kind of there.

Today I… did something that I don’t think qualifies as totally reconnish, but definitely leans more that direction than things I’ve done in the past.

No. Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Last month I did ritual, which I hadn’t done in a while. I was poking around on the Web and realized that the day on which I was doing ritual happened to coincide with the day of the month (on the Athens calendar) when Apollon was honored. A thought entered my mind–internal? external?–that it would not be a bad idea to stick with this for a few months and see how it worked. To honor my Patron on His day each month. So I marked the next few on my calendar.

Today was the next one. The plan was originally to try to do ritual if I could do so during daylight hours (worshipping a solar deity at night just feels wrong), but I despair of being able to carve that time out. So this morning I went out and poured a libation, and stood there being quietly respectful and generally worshipful whilst an appropriate song played on my iPod.

It felt… right. It clicked. It worked. The timing could have been better; sunrise or noon would probably have been more appropriate than some random time mid-morning when I remembered to do it. But it worked, generally.

I doubt the ancient Greeks used orange soda for libations, though. (I didn’t even think about my choice–Sunkist–until the song was half over, except to sort of get something that was unusual for me. It seems appropriate in a quirky sort of way, though.)