A Month of Written Devotion #4-7: Beginning, Forgiveness, Light and Dark

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

(From this point on, having introduced all of my primary gods, I may write prose, poetry, or song about any number of them, based on the daily prompt. We shall see how this goes!)

Beginning

I believed once, breathed your essence of more-than-is as readily as air,
Felt the dark-furred flesh beneath the palm of my hand and trusted in the heat of it.

It was easier before they taught me to doubt, to simply know and love you.
Easier to read the blessings of a world comprised of a thousand tiny messages and lessons in each glint of the Eye upon rain-kissed grass.

When I faltered it must have been nothing to you, years of silence in one mortal life passing as quickly as those damp, summer afternoons fading to night.

Did you know we would begin again, just before the leaves would turn so many shades of red?
Did you send Him to collect me when the time was right, all sound and crashing thunder of proof to balance your quiet, unwavering shadow?

Our Beginning felt more like an end, my beautiful, patient Mother.
A long-awaited end and answer to so many dewdrop questions left untouched.

Forgiveness

Their fingers entwine,
my goddesses of starlight and time,
fluid, connected,
and radiant in Their sudden wholeness.

They become one vast sky,
full of incomprehensible timelessness
and music resounding in the vibrations of galaxies.

Frogsong and sistra collide with my heartbeat
and they pull me into Them:
beyond my body, my home,
beyond my community, my country,
beyond my continent, my world.

I am overwhelmed in Their shining waters of the sky.
I breathe the universe-as-ocean as though returned to what I knew before life.
I am so very small,
a speck of nothing from other motes of dust
I left behind.

What mistakes were mine, what fears chained me down,
what are they in the presence of such vast possibility?

I am forgiven by my own awakening,
My eyes open to the beauty of infinity
and infinite love.

 Light & Dark

I struggled to write about these concepts separately, because so much of what I love about my gods is Their capacity to contain, and inhabit, both brilliance and shadow. Shifting my focus instead to the combination of the two felt more balanced, more right in that sense of “this is now complete” that I associate with living in ma’at, living in ways that earn me those rare moments of something akin to pride or approval from that vast entity and presence that is all of Them or One at any given moment.

More tangibly, it is both the light and the dark that helps me to connect with Them. I rise before dawn, or kneel after sunset, and striking match to wood a tiny light erupts at my fingertips. I sing the sacred candle-and-incense text I’ve memorized from nigh-daily practice, to a melody my sister in the faith wrote and shared with me, and which I loved from the first time I heard it.

As I sing, I bring match to wick,  then touch the incense to the flickering glow. In the liminal contrast of the dancing flame, the gentle glow at the tip of the scented offering, and the darkness that surrounds me and the shrine, I am carried away from a body that itches and aches, a mind that is too critical and prone to worry. It is the contrast of the shadows of the room and the suddenly golden, fire-lit faces of my five gods that helps me to transition from the profane to the sacred, to greet Them, as pure in body and mind as I can be.

And then They are there, existing with me in this liminal space, taking subsequently offered food and drink, hearing my songs, listening to my prayers, or just holding me as is needed. They are happy with me when aspects of my life shine with blessings, angry alongside me when I speak to Them of the tragedies I see in the world around me and cannot fix.

They are sometimes upset with me or each other, even my Parents: the beautiful, blinding, light of my Mother’s solar clarity as Eye clashing with the shadows and obfuscation of a Father Who breaks things down to improve upon them. Yet in existing as individuals with individual views and perspectives, They seem capable of, at least to a degree, understanding my struggles to walk a life of both light and dark (albeit on a different, mortal scale.)

I am glad to worship gods of both the light and the dark, grateful not to have to pick between the two. There is strength, and wisdom, in both realms.

In the space that exists between, They meet me and I learn.