PBP 2013 – C is for Conversations Over Coffee

[redheart]

Originally published at Ekunyi's Embers. You can comment here or there.

Yes, “conversations over coffee,” and no, I swear that the oddball nature of my selected topic is not (*cough* at least not entirely) because I’m currently on pain medications. Bear with me.

In my experience, spiritual space can be found or made. I’ve known mornings wandering through the woods when a group of deer ran past me and I was awed by their fluidity and power, afternoons at the top of mountains in Colorado watching a thunderstorm miles off and recognizing how small I was, evenings by a lake as the sun sets, crickets sing and the world descends into darkness after the brief brilliance of a blood red sky reflected across the water. These are found moments of wonder in my life, lived expressions that I am fortunate enough to see, feel, touch by the grand chance of my being in the right place at the right time.

Yet there are other spaces deliberately created. Preparing for and entering my shrine, of course, is an obvious instance of this. My next post, which I’m happy to say will be a part of the exciting, new Kemetic Roundtable project, will describe the purification process I undertake to fully transfer myself out of the secular and into the sacred. Yet there are other places, other ways, in which moments of spirituality creep into my life. Most notably: cafes.

I adore cafes. I do almost all of my writing in such. I love experiencing the sounds and sensations of people flowing in and out, noting how lives briefly touch other lives, seeing poems written, listening to the murmur of conversations held. There’s an energy in a cafe that is hard to recreate elsewhere, and it’s a vibrant thing, as so many words are put to countless pages or exchanged across tables, yet never really overlap. Each little nook, chair, bench becomes a tiny territory of invention and being, and you can almost sense the power of the place if you really care to look.

When I sit in a cafe by myself I can choose to wall myself away to delve into my own research, pulling up articles to read, finding new facets of the past which I can reshape to suit my spiritual needs in the present. Yet I also have one particular spiritual entity I work with who enjoys, at the very least seems amused by, my time in cafes.

  Set and I have conversations over coffee or chai. I’ll purchase it, leave it out while it cools as an offering, and then revert it while we mentally “chat.” Conversations range the gambit from serious discussions of my recent efforts to meet His requirements, to supportive advice in times when I’m facing some form of adversity, to semi-risque, swear-filled chats about absolutely random nonsense, that often end in me getting “gibbslapped” for taking it over the line before He one-ups me.

Speaking with Set, or any god for that matter, is something I generally don’t bother to over-analyze. I could call it an imagined voice, as I honestly do not, or cannot, hear such things aloud, and the skeptic in me is inclined to say that what I hear of Him is brought about by my own capacity to create a voice within my head. But who is to say where the divine begins and my own creativity ends? Perhaps it is my own voice, but He prompts me to hear His words, or more abstractly guides the conversation I hold “with myself” in the direction I need it go so as to gain something from it.

The walls between what is Netjer and what is human invention are flexible, as are the walls between those of us sitting in the cafe as we write away in our own little worlds but are inspired by what we see around us, the flavor of our drink, the snow falling outside the window, the question asked of us by a curious table-neighbor who wants to know how the novel’s going today. Why worry about the exact technicalities of what inspires us, what guides us? Better to just let it be, to drink coffee, to mentally converse, and to enjoy that little pocket of the sacred in the midst of a fast-paced life.