Daily Archives: January 22, 2007

Spiritual Housecleaning

I dusted off my personal altar today and rearranged things a bit. I updated my spellbox with new petitions and burned old ones that had seen fruition or pertained to events now concluded. I lit candles, purified with incense, and settled down to meditate. This is part of what I’m doing to keep in touch with the foundations of my practice.

One of the changes I want to make in my life involves dealing with how overwhelmed by spiritual administration I’ve been feeling. For the past six years I’ve written and taught and led and guided and it’s time to pull back from that to focus on reacquainting myself with my own personal spiritual practices once again. The energy I’ve been putting into supporting other spiritual experiences has to be turned inward for a time to nourish my own spirituality.

And having said that, this afternoon I sat down to begin putting the basics down in a document for an article I proposed to WynterGreene for the Spring spiritual gardening issue. More spiritual-guidance type writing, yes; but I’m doing this from a different perspective. Also, it’s been over a year since I handed off the green witch book, so my brain has had time to recover from intense immersion in the subject and the ensuing evasion of even thinking about it (a perfectly natural form of self-defense when one has eaten/breathed/slept a single subject for over a year, in order to avoid burnout), and now I’m actually beginning to sense a revival of my interest in the topic again. It’s terribly nice to finish this article outline and already be a third of the way to my target word count. It means that when I expand the point-form outline into full sentences I’ll be over halfway there, and then when I add sentences to further explore/explain and link things I’ll be right where I’m supposed to be. As a requested submission for the same issue I’m also working on an annotated bibliography of sorts of selected titles I used as reference for WotGW, and it’s much harder to narrow the list down to my top ten ten picks from the list of books than I expected it to be. It feels good to have made this much progress on both articles when I was only expecting to work on one.

Countdown to Imbolc, my favourite festival: Nine days!

Brief Weekend Roundup

Gratuitous icon post to show off Curtana‘s genius! She made this icon especially for me to use on those days when I amme indeed sick to my hart of typefetting. Or typing, as the case may be.

I had a good weekend, which surprises me somewhat (and again, I am saddened by this observation; when did my weekends become not enjoyable?). It’s the first time in a long while that at bedtime on Sunday night I didn’t feel as if the weekend had been a write-off or had gone too fast or had been more exhausting than the week itself. HRH made an excellent mess of ribs according to his father’s recipe on Saturday for company, and they tasted just as good the next night when we reheated them after going out visiting. Liam was certainly a fan of them when he finally got to taste them, as he’d gone to bed before they were ready the previous evening.

The social aspect of the weekend was especially pleasant. I spent time with people I don’t see often enough on a regular basis. I also got to see the fabulous paint job HRH had done in the ADZO household, and it’s lovely.

Speaking of Liam, I am very proud of him today because he ate a whole bowl of real oatmeal with raisins and chopped apple with a touch of maple syrup. This is noteworthy because he has been much too busy doing Liam-things involving trains and books to eat much breakfast for a week or so, preferring to eat breakfast muffins and fruit on the go. To get him in his chair eating a real sit-down meal sometime between waking up and lunchtime is a very big thing. I tried yesterday and he had a few mouthfuls but I ate most of it. Today I only ate a bite, and he ate the rest. Also, he blew kisses back to me while HRH was getting him into the car and I was waving from the window. He hasn’t been too clear on blowing kisses up to now; he tends to cover his mouth and kiss his palm. Today he added the hand motion and it made my day.