Back in late February I shared my current long-term goals. I had promised to share my progress toward these goals like I did last year. But life took a turn, as life is wont to do, and here it is July and I have not shed any light into this year’s process.
The reason I am finally writing about my goals four months past when I intended is complex and at some level still a mystery even to me. But the last few blogs on balance are an output of my process, so it makes sense (at least to me) to share more of what is happening to produce these latest musings.
The long-term goals I shared were deepen my spiritual journey, nurture the sustainable, passionate and creative fabric of my life, and share my message. This is a much shorter list when compared with last year's, which reflects the narrowing of my focus along with a deepening of my vision. Each of these goal statements needed further definition, so I have spent the last several months clarifying my priorities and I think I can share some of what each of these mean to me at this juncture.
My plan is to write about each of these goals over the next several weeks. I may still intersperse this series with some of my regular rants -- continuing recent threads or maybe even begin some new ones.
Deepen My Spiritual Journey
This goal has three components; study, practice and my tradition. I will cover the first two today, and discuss my spiritual tradition in a subsequent post.
Study: Specifically, my focus is to study wisdom traditions. I started the year with my reading of Sufi, Yoga, and Buddhist texts. I am slowly working my way through Evelyn Underhill’s books on mysticism while simultaneously studying advanced dreamwork. And this fall, I will begin the certification program for archetypal pattern analysis with the Assisi Institute.
I realized a couple of years ago that my reading had almost dropped to a trickle when I began wearing bifocals. So I purchased a pair of reading glasses so I could stop the incessant head bobbing associated with getting my head in the right position to read below the invisible line. But until I started to focus on reading this year, I had not realized how much I have been starving for intellectual nourishment.
I use to inhale books. My reading speed has dropped significantly from the more than 2,500 words per minute of my pre-glasses stage. So this goal includes me making time in my life for some serious reading. I had started to pick up speed before the prednisone slowed me down again. I figure this will work itself out in time, as long as I continue to make time for reading.
With the exception of old-school science fiction and some recent graphic novels, I tend to primarily read non-fiction. And I have been collecting a ton of books over the years that I have not had the time to read. Who knows, with this goal, I might finally make a dent in that pile.
Spiritual Practice: My spiritual practice has multiple components. The first is canonical prayers. I have been slowly adopting canonical hours for a couple of years. Well this year saw the debut of my canonical prayers; I have six prayers throughout the day along with a mid afternoon astrological mediation.
The prayers are offered at waking, 9 am(Air), noon(Fire), 3 pm, 6 pm(Water), 9 pm(Earth) and bedtime. Each prayer has an elemental component, a patron diety component or both. The 3 pm meditation is based on the correlation of days of the week with the seven elder planets, i.e Sunday/Sun, Monday/Moon, Tuesday/Mars, Wednesday/Mercury, Thursday/Jupiter, Friday/Venus, and Saturday/Saturn. So each day at 3 pm, I meditate on the planet of the day in its current astrological sign using the element and modality of the sign as my jumping off point.
Lately the pattern is that I remember to do the earlier practices, i.e. morning, air and fire prayers. But I sometimes forget to do the water and earth prayers, and the bedtime prayer has been missed consistently for weeks. By the time my head hits the pillow, I am so exhausted that the idea of prayer completely fades. I have been meditating on this quandary and I am beginning to think it is related to my sleeping problems as of late.
The reason I am so exhausted at night is because I have been waking up at earlier and earlier each day – often between 3:30 and 6 am. Sometimes I can coax myself back to sleep but that leaves me with a drugged out feeling the rest of the day. So now if I cannot go back to sleep within 30 minutes, I just get up, which leads to extremely long days. Once I realized how my sleep problems were impacting my prayers, I stopped ignoring it and began working on a solution. I also stopped beating myself up for basically being sleepy as all get out. (Oddly this is preferable to the sleep two hours, get up and pee, repeat cycle of the prednisone induced sleep. So I am not going back on a night time dosage just yet.)
The other components have to do with ritual, meditation, incorporating spiritual components to some of my existing routines and other practices whose aim is deepening my journey. I already had prayers and mantras inside my yoga practice. So now I am adding even more intention to my planning, routines and day-to-day activities. This is a work-in-progress.
Next up, The Order of the Elemental Mysteries.
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Submitted by katrina on Fri, 07/10/2009 - 3:27pm.
Wish I could be there. Very well spoken.
Katrina,
I wish you all the blessings and power you need on your journey. Thank you for these words. It is good to remember that returning to work (and thus returning to grace) bring a chance for us all to rest and have joy.
Wishing you joy in the Work.
David
Dear Katrina- Thorn reposted your blog and happy am I. Your passion, always so immense, comes blowing out in these words. So akin to my own heart and soul that it makes me have a bittersweet smile.
The Storm is only now coming to the edges of our universe and yet it will sweep and consume all that is. In the end, our beautiful universe will be so much...more? Different? Complete? Who knows?
All I do know is my soul came here to witness and be part in this period. I cannot shrink from the work. I am here with you, fae sister!
Thought-provoking piece, Katrina. Thanks.
I don't know what to call myself either. In Pagandom, I've taken to referring to myself as a Witch at Large. In the interfaith world where I'm active, I call myself a Pagan. Sometimes I call myself an uppity woman or a Second Wave Feminist. I've never really thought to publicly identify myself by my sexuality, het woman, which is very "white bread" and old-fashioned. Not only het, but serially monogamous for the most part. It seems almost a liability these days to say you're het, but I am proudly and happily so. I tend towards intellectualism but only have a BA, which doesn't carry much weight, at least in public and professional worlds, no matter how much you've studied, trained, and can articulate, even teach.
My biological heritage is Irish, Dutch, French Huguenot, Euro-mongrel. My social heritage is Roman Catholic on one side and conservative Methodist, temperance-crusading, women's rights and education on the other, with distinct East Coast sensibilities, now mellowed by more than half a century living on the Left Coast. My maternal political heritage is conservative Republican (altho what my relatives might think of current trends in the GOP I cannot imagine, since they did have brains and they did think and they did have a social conscience), yet I am much farther left in my outlook than any elected official I know. My paternal political heritage is blue collar Democratic, except that my dad broke with his family on politics and allied with my mother's family's conservatism.
I'm a former hippie, a home-birth advocate, a home death and green burial advocate, an opponent of capital punishment and resorting to warfare to resolve humankind's differences. I support the right to conscious self-deliverance. I rejoice in any and all consensual expressions of love and eros. I'm a lover and a mom.
I have never missed voting in an election and I disrespect those who don't avail themselves of this hard-won right. (I have ancestors who fought the Brits in the American Revolution.) I support workers' rights. I recognize our interdependence on this planet, so could be called a greenie. I'm a committed environmentalist in my day-to-day life (in terms of eating locally grown food, expanding public transit, recycling, preserving open space and wildlife, opposing exploitation of natural resources [strip mining, oil-drilling, nuclear facilities, agribusiness, monocultures, clear-cutting timber, overuse of pesticides, genetic modification, etc.]) I want to make the city streets "safe for dancing," as my old friend Tony Serra said when he ran for mayor of SF on the Platypus Party ticket.
Well, you got me going there, my friend. Thought-provoking read, as I said. ;-)
xo,
Macha
Lovely azaleas!
[cough][gag][snort][sneeze]
Just lovely...
I know what you mean.
I feel you. There is too much bs- particularly when people decide that their temperament is tantamount to truthful and ignore everyone else.
I get irked by immature extroverts or closet introverts who ignore you REPEATEDLY and then pretend you're out of line for being upset by the time they can't pretend you didn't say anything anymore. I find that the same people will ignore you if you blow up right away, too, and that it's because they just don't think that honoring what you value is important to maintaining a relationship, or even worse: that you don't know what you value at all and that it's all a mind game for their pleasure or annoyance. Then they call you passive-aggressive, aggressive, moody, touchy and temperamental. I call them "not listening".