I'm not going to lie. As of late, the deities and spirits have seemed distant. I can't hear them the way they seemed to be jumping out at me during the first year and half of my path. Work piled up, strapping me between a prison of concrete and glass doors to where even the sky through our windows appears less of the domain of air, and more of a tainted distortion as the sun's light passes through the corporate junction between consumerism and materialism. My house has become a cave which I run into just to escape from the thought of work, and thus, I hide in it like a bear hibernating.
When my thoughts have turned to spiritual matters - usually ending in reflections on how dried up my spiritual connections seem to be now - despair usually ensues. And as an adult, I have, however mature it may be, learned to hide my emotions in pointless busy tasks even while at home - reading for hours on end, gaming splurges that sometimes last for days (this is not to say that enjoying either of those things is inherently bad, just I indulge in them oftentimes as opportunities to hide from what is really the matter).
So as the months have passed, and each full moon passes by unremarked because I have lacked the time or energy to ritually honor Luna's dance, I found myself wondering if all of my research and spiritual investment in paganism has actually brought any real change in my life. Have I become a more aware, wonder struck child of the moon and sun just to find myself trapped and numbed by the modern world so many of us are forced to live in out of necessity?
And then I remember to walk outside, and stop thinking and fretting for just a minute, and actually listen. I am fortunate enough to live currently in a place that, though in the middle of a small city, is surrounded by nature. The cicadas are brewing their primal song, the cricket's call out to one another in a frenzied symphony of life, and the wind whispers the tree's chorus. It all seems to say,
We are here, We have always been here, It is you who have left us
And I realized that all my concern about ritual and rising to celebrate the "right" holidays has been grossly misguided. Instead of worrying about when I can commune with spirits and celebrate the old ones of wild, I just need to step outside and let them do the talking. That is not to say that the pagan holidays should go by unremarked, as they are wonderful points of the year that we as a community can connect and unite in honor of key segments of the seasons, of the spirit's track along the alternations of the earth. But I spent too much time on when, on the spectacle of how it "should be done" rather than just letting the natural lines of communication open up.
Friends of ours graciously took us on a trip with them yesterday, and we went hiking to see a sixty foot waterfall. The moment we began climbing up a back road of the mountains, the visions of the spirits started to hit me again. I saw a laughing, vivacious woman whose laughter caused the hills, rocks, and peaks to jut out, making the ridges around us. The sun was a flower held by the child we call The Real, rays petals reaching down to earth. And the waterfall herself was singing, her water splashing over me, drawing me into her and her fall, her surrender to the earth. Everything spun, everything was held in balance. Sky romances earth, and the Earth's children are weathered away to visages of segmented rock which cradle us, and tell the story of how the gods are just the planet, just the world, and it's forces twirling in the love light of Stars.
We try to serrate the spiritual as though it's knife can only catch in moments like this one, but I had been so emotionally drained from the pattern of life and work that the spirit's knife failed to catch when trying to open up the parts of me that need to hear the cicada song, the bird trills, the wind's dirge of summer into fall. I'm now finding Artemis roaming in fields of human life I never would have believed she could inhabit before. And Apollo is no longer the distant pre-christ archetype he was for me before, a deity I payed homage to because he held sway in my home realm, that of Story. Now I see him as a man by the fire telling me to Speak, to tell him a Story, with my life and the words it has given me.
