Yesterday I woke up, fed the cats, and shambled into the room in my apartment that serves as storage and altar space to do my morning divination. Standing there in front of the window, I suddenly realized that the two trees outside had erupted into beautiful snowy flowers, and I had a moment of intense mixed feelings — absolute joy at the beauty of it, the undeniable spring-ness of the light and the flowers and the warmth coming through the open window, and an incredible sadness that I didn’t even know what kind of trees those were.
I’m going to check on that last one.
Today it’s colder and rainy, but it still smells like spring.
I have a writer’s instincts, a storyteller’s instincts. My natural inclination is to lay out a big, flashy beginning for my blog — invoke the muses, extol the goddesses and gods, tell you how wise words can change the world. This is me, fighting those inclinations. I’ve been reading a lot lately about monasticism, particularly autobiographies of those who’ve lived, temporarily or long-term, the monastic life, and one thing that strikes me over and over is that religion for these people is a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other sort of business. It’s not about setting the big goal and charging toward it: in fact, one of the first lessons for most of these people is that the Sacred doesn’t have anything invested in their big goals. The Sacred has its own rhythm and its own agenda. In sixty years, you may still not know where you’re going or how you got here, but you’ll know you’ve been changed by your experiences.
I certainly don’t live a monastic life, but I feel the wisdom in that way of going about things. Today I’m writing to you about rain and trees. Tomorrow I may write about my childhood memories of religion, or the ogham, or the archaeology book I’m reading, or why I still can’t knit.
