Two Roads Diverged…

Some days, I feel like my whole life is a famous poem just splashed out on paper to read. It sits there like a flashing neon sign to me when for everyone else, it’s just a bunch of fancy words on paper. Maybe everyone feels that way sometimes; maybe I’m alone in this.

After the nice woman on the other side of the state told me to get going or else, I came home and ranted for a while. It wasn’t really the message that angered me insomuch as the parting shot, the bit that left me pale and shaking. The bit that, upon seeing me after the reading, my friend asked me if I was okay. I’ve never talked about that part; I probably won’t.

When I was calm enough, I sat down with my gods and asked them what the hell I needed to do. They were all very nice about the situation but it was still a lot to take in. They let me bitch and moan and listened while I railed on about how I was a good fucking devotee who didn’t deserve this next round of horse shit. I guess they understood why I was so angry.

I laid all my cards on the table about how I was angry and how I didn’t know what the fuck I was supposed to be doing. I told them I thought about leaving, just packing it all up and burying myself away because it was all just too damn hard. I wasn’t serious, not really, but they talked me down.

At that ledge, looking down, I realized I was overwhelmed with all of this. I was at the point of being so overloaded that I couldn’t figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing or why I was supposed to care. My gods told me that my tentative plan of taking a time out was a good one. We decided that I had until March to make a choice.

After that, they showed me two possibilities. Isn’t that always the way though? There are two doors to choose from with the frog that always tells the truth and the frog that always lies. No frogs this time, just two possibilities to choose from with a general idea of where both would lead.

I had three months to figure it all out.

And sorry I could not travel both; And be one traveler, long I stood; And looked down one as far as I could – The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

I am the type of person to stick my head in the sand when things are too big. It’s actually a familial trait passed down from generation to generation. Eventually I will do something but when I get to the “I can’t actually form words” stage because there is too much going on, I get overloaded and hide.

My gods may have been kind to me because I was overwhelmed but they kept reminding me that I had a time limit. Arbitrary calendar dates are a thing for me and even though I knew I should probably look a little deeper into it, I chose not to. The partial glimpses of possibilities in December were enough.

The first path looked nice enough. It was calm and quiet with a sense of familiarity that sent shock waves through me. I looked at that possible future and saw that, while things would be dealt with efficiently and relatively quickly, things would change to a degree that I would wind up losing out on what I have established for myself thus far.

It wouldn’t go away, per se, but the dynamic would change. And that was a game changer. I could see my gods behind me, but crowded to the background.

I have worked very hard and gone through a hell of a lot of shit to get where I am today. I wasn’t saying good-bye to it, but I was, in effect, trudging up a mountain and away from my gods, my path, my life. As much as they annoy me, the possibility of that dynamic change was worrisome and confusing. I didn’t like what I saw.

The other way was more frightening. It made my heart stop with its deep, dark places eschewing light and cheer. It was filled with fear and with sorrow. There was nothing recognizable to me there. I looked at that possible future and saw an interim change in the dynamic, but at the end things would be much more manageable.

It would take longer to deal with things, though. Even with the picture drawn before me, the path was filled with unknown pitfalls and I would need to travel slowly and carefully, trudging through the slog and mud.

Knowing how hard I have worked to get to where I am, even if most people don’t recognize that hard work, I realized that while the happier seeming path would be simple, the darker seeming path was more in line with what the end game. I had to take time to look inside and figure out what was more important here.

But as my gods steadily pinged me, reminding me that we did in fact have a time limit, I was depressed for the decision process. Though they kept coming at me regularly with hits and reminders, I ignored them; that whole overwhelmed thing making its debut.

Besides, I had actually made a decision. I just hadn’t announced it yet.

Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. – The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

In the last few weeks, I’ve been dreaming about various modifications to myself. I think the one that took the cake was the dream where I got a tattoo of the ending stanza to the poem, The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. I got the gist to a point, but I was still a little confused by the dream. (Not to mention that thinking on it over the last few days has only made me really want to get it tattooed on my forearm, just like in the dream.)

It’s actually a little amusing that the dream took that particular poem and that particular section. I’ve been saying from the get-go that my religious life, and by extension my mundane as well, oft resembles that poem. It’s not just my favorite famous poem of all time. It is me.

It’s taken a little bit of back and forth on my part to confirm what the fuck my mind was telling me, but I got it after a bit. (Still trying to decide if a tattoo is really warranted though.) I got the message; I understood what was happening finally. But of course, the emotional hits are never over with just one final nail on the coffin.

Last night, I stood between Papa Legba and Loki, looking from one to the other.

When I looked at Legba, I could see things so clearly and I wanted so much to walk beside him again. He was a rock in a time when I needed one even while he was teaching me important things. He held my hand and helped me through the worst of the bullshit after my head split further open and the Long Term was explained to me. I cried for months after his door shut on me and still sometimes cry, like I am now.

The sweet filled smell of him was there and I could see him in such a beautiful sun-filled place. Green fields and clear lit paths, birds chirping and the crossroads so clearly marked for the eye to see.

But I turned to look at Loki and the skies were gray. There were storm clouds in the distance. Everything was hard to see and I couldn’t tell what was slog and what was path. I wanted so much to turn away from this red-headed unknown in my life, contract be damned and knowing that the Old Man would get me out of it if I asked, and march the fuck away.

But three months ago, I saw what my life could and probably would look like with Papa. And I saw what my life could and probably would look like with Loki. And I decided then what I had to re-illustrate last night.

Did you know you can grieve for might-have-beens? It’s entirely possible. I wasn’t aware though maybe I should have been.

I had to finally say good-bye to someone who meant a lot to me. It’s not the first time I’ve done it, but that doesn’t make this any easier. Loki’s kindness after didn’t really help, though it distracted me at least. I will miss the might-have-beens, but I need my autocracy as it is now, not what it would become with Papa Legba and his brood. I will miss the relationship and the lessons he set before me, but what ice been working towards is more important than all that.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
– The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Lent 2015.

With Lent on the horizon, I couldn’t help but turn my thoughts to the lwa who had left me without much farewell last year. Oh, there was a bit of a farewell between Papa Legba and I, but the rest of the bunch just kind of disappeared without so much as a wave or by-your-leave. I was angry at the way that everything ended. I guess I’m just so used to beginning, middle, and emphatic ending that no final words of farewell kind of ground on me.

As my thoughts began turning towards Papa Legba, I did a bit of soul-searching. I was really angry when he left. I felt as if I had been, yet again, cast adrift on a sea of torment. He had caught my little dingy in his hands and taught me how to weather the constant storms within that sea. He had told me stories and jokes; he had given me a new appreciate of things that I took for granted, but above all else, he held my hand when I most needed it.

When he left, I was completely miserable. Papa Legba showed up because Sekhmet was at her wit’s end and needed me to be taught a few things about servitude and to get a few other lessons out of the way. I knew this; so why had I been so hurt when he left? I had always thought, somewhere, that with the end of the lessons, he would remain. I thought that he would just always be there. Change to me is something that I have been going through so much in the last two years that I’ve just wanted one thing that remained the same. And I found a good thing, I think, with Papa Legba.

Sometimes, I would dream of the two of us in a garden or in the forest. He was always making something grow. He’s very good at getting things to grow, as I’ve found out. What I didn’t seem to realize until only just recently that each change in the scenery, the overall goal was the same: he was creating a garden and needed to nurture it. We talked a lot about the nature of what nurturing a garden was like and how that relates back to the nurturing one must do for themselves. He told me jokes and he told me stories. He said to me last night that it’s time for me to go back to where I belong; the lesson is over. And it was a lesson and a half. He wasn’t just giving me a way out of the really oppressive atmosphere I was in, but he was also helping me to grow, my core, my soul, and everything in between. He was busy nurturing the fledgling plants and the older plants that had been accidentally pinched out when I became so angry and so embittered.

I’ve been staring at this quote since Ash Wednesday. I went looking through my old entries about Lent and found this sitting there. I found this recreated a second time when I came to the realization that the lwa had truly gone. He had bid me a brief goodbye during Lent of last year, but I had still just believed that he would continue to nurture the garden that I am. I wasn’t taking into context what he was doing or what his plans were; I was only thinking about myself.

I think, though, a certain selfishness is appropriate. I had died in every metaphorical way during our relationship’s tenure and he had always been there to help me pick up the pieces. He found me in all of my inner hiding places and pulled me into the light of the day. It was hard and painful, I think, last year because I didn’t have that person who would force me to look at what I needed to in order to figure out where the chess pieces were on the board.

I still don’t have that. I have a new little filler, to a degree, but Heru-Wer is not Papa Legba. They have a certain obsession about gardening in common and they have both used garden metaphors to get me to latch on to something. But as Heru-Wer told me when we first started being friends, he was not in my life to fill the hole that Papa Legba had created but to create a Heru-Wer sized niche instead.

The niche has been created, but I’ve discovered that the hole in the shape of Papa Legba has cleared up. As I poked around in my ib the last few days, I found that the sore spot that had his name scrawled across it didn’t hurt nearly as much. I continued the poking and prodding with other things, gauging the reactions that I discovered as I worked around what had once been as sharp of a pain as I could fathom. Now, though, it is nothing but a spot that has been scabbed over and healed up… and it seems to have healed up properly.

That’s a relief; I’m kind of tired of hurts healing wrong.

With this year, I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t need to pay any attention to Lent or to sacrifice. I had kind of figured that Lent was over with, just as much as my relationship with Papa Legba. But on Ash Wednesday, one of my coworkers asked me with devilish delight, “What have you given up for Lent this year?” I hadn’t, actually, thought about it at all because I was over the hump, wasn’t I? Did I really need to sacrifice anything?

Evidently, my mouth and my mind were on two different wavelengths because what I said immediately was, “Diet Coke.”

It just popped out there.

And now it was out there.

In the world.

Being all thought about and digested.

“Oh, no,” my coworker said to me, “this is going to be terrible.” I don’t believe I was that grouchy without diet Coke last year (although the amount of posts I made about diet Coke on Tumblr would lead me to believe that I was fairly crotchety). The rumor mill ground around the office, which isn’t much of a rumor mill because we have an instant messaging program always running between the 10 of us, and everyone knew I had given up diet Coke.

Again.

I’ve thought about the reason behind this. Why did I say this before I could explain that I wasn’t observing Lent this year? I don’t want to be trite here, but I can’t help but think that there is something purposeful here. On religious matters, I try to be very careful and concise with my speech especially when speaking on them to people who don’t know the intricate woven threads of my path. But in this case, the words were out of my mouth before I could even think to myself, the fuck is wrong with you?

A part of me believes that it’s just an automatic pilot thing. Another part of me believes that this is more than just autopilot.

Out of everything I could sacrifice, there is nothing more significant than diet Coke to me. As some people have mentioned, it’s practically my life’s blood. Fuck, I drink a hell of a lot of soda every fucking day and it’s always diet Coke. (Once in a blue moon, I will have a Sunkist.) And so my automatic pilot mouth went to the first and most painful thing I could sacrifice, something that would hit me right between the eyes about twenty fucking times a day.

Last year, I sacrificed diet Coke because it was the only thing that I could think of that would fall under the category of a true sacrifice. This year, I sacrificed diet Coke without having a reason. This should prove interesting.

Missing.

In case no one was fully aware, I tend to jump to the worst possible conclusion about things. It doesn’t matter what in the world the thing actually is, but if there is a worst-case scenario, you had better believe that my mind has entertained it. My mind has probably not just entertained it, but invented completely improbable probabilities to go along with said worst-case scenario. I try not to do too much entertaining of said improbabilities, but you know, your mind does whatever it wants. Usually, though, I try not to announce those scenarios until I have something definitive in which to report, which is probably why it took me years to finally say, “Oh, yes, that is Sekhmet calling, isn’t it?”

So, the worst case scenario – let’s entertain you with that first – is that the lwa have all up and disappeared. The best case scenario, as far as I can tell, would be that I am full of shit and just being a dumbass. The middle case scenario is that they need some time away from me, just as I probably need time away from them, and we’ll all come back together at some point in future. But, I actually suspect the worst case scenario is what may be going on.

It started just after Lent. I was pretty busy, of course, with Sekhmet-related things. This was to be expected because I (a) promised, (b) don’t break my promises, and (c) had some bonding to get done for the next phase in our relationship. As much as I may have not wanted to go back prior to Lent, I was willing to get to the new step after having learned what I could throughout Lent regarding Lent. It was easy, of course, to see similarities and to fit the dogma regarding Lent in a Kemetic standpoint and how to fit that into my relationship building exercises with Sekhmet.

Papa Legba left me at the bus stop, so to speak, and tooted on his merry little way.

I haven’t seen him since.

After Lent was over, I went through the motions of giving him his daily coffee. We would share a cup just about every day, either in companionable silence or while talking over things that were bothering me. Whatever the case would be, we would share the coffee. I often felt very upset that I hadn’t the ability to do more, but Papa would always remind me that I am one of those souls that feels the need to be demonstrative with my affections, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. He said coffee was A-Okay with him because he loved coffee and I made it just strong enough for him to enjoy.

But those morning moments, stolen amid getting ready for the day ahead, didn’t return after Lent. Even though I continued to give him coffee, I couldn’t feel his presence. I looked for him on my rides into work, even though they were shortened. I looked for him in the places that I thought he would be after I was bonded. I stole away in the middle of the night, uncomfortable with the golden thing around my neck, and looked in the gardens and forested areas where I thought he would be and I found nothing.

On those stolen evenings, I would look for other lwa who had been companions in this, as well. I often spent whole nights in that other place, going to the place where Bawon’s bonfire normally was held and found the place empty. Or, I would run through the forest, searching for Gran Bwa just as I always had but instead of catching glimpses of him laughing at me always, always ahead of me, there was no one there to laugh. I saw no one and nothing and Papa Legba was curiously missing.

In the morning of those stolen evenings, I would make his coffee and try not to worry that I had done something amazingly wrong by becoming a bonded servant. But it’s hard for me to not go to that worst-case scenario. I started this entry off with assuring anyone who is willingly reading this drivel that is who I am: I think in terms of, “IT IS ALL SHIT.” I don’t know if I do this in the hopes that things aren’t as shitty as I think they will be and so, therefore, am always surprised pleasantly when they’re not. Or if I just like to have worst-case scenarios (even with all of those improbable possibilities in the offing) completely covered just in case.

I was worst-case scenario-ing there. I was beginning to think Papa Legba had left me.

I, of course, went through all of the things that he and I had done together during Lent. Most of it was in dream form. He was always, always nurturing something and making something grow, while I whined at him about all manner of things. He would just listen and that was that. I couldn’t help but go back to that final Lent entry I had written and found something that I had dismissed in the writing:

“Sometimes, I would dream of the two of us in a garden or in the forest. He was always making something grow. He’s very good at getting things to grow, as I’ve found out. What I didn’t seem to realize until only just recently that each change in the scenery, the overall goal was the same: he was creating a garden and needed to nurture it. We talked a lot about the nature of what nurturing a garden was like and how that relates back to the nurturing one must do for themselves. He told me jokes and he told me stories. He said to me last night that it’s time for me to go back to where I belong; the lesson is over. And it was a lesson and a half. He wasn’t just giving me a way out of the really oppressive atmosphere I was in, but he was also helping me to grow, my core, my soul, and everything in between. He was busy nurturing the fledgling plants and the older plants that had been accidentally pinched out when I became so angry and so embittered.“

In a fit of pique, I cried out to a very small group of friends about this. Someone responded and told me to keep cool. They reminded me that things had been rough and that I was probably worst-case scenario-ing. Of course, of course, that made sense. That’s what I do. I go to the worst possible place in the fucking world and I just live there for a while, moodily sifting through the improbabilities. Okay, I decided, I would just keep at it because, you know, Dory has excellent advice. So, I just kept swimming and kept looking in those stolen moments.

When nothing came of my repeated cries for his attention, I told myself that he was probably busy. I’ve noticed, of course, that the lwa are reaching out more and more to new devotees across the board. Perhaps he had things to do regarding getting those new devotees? Why can’t the lwa and the relationships they develop with various servants also go through a fallow time? How many times had I very calmly explained fallow times to newbies and reminded them that there were so many possible reasons that the gods had gone on walkabout? Of course, I reminded myself, the lwa could just as easily do the same.

But I was uneasy with all of that. I don’t trust my instincts, which is probably why I end up in the worst-case scenario. But my instincts were telling me that my having woken up in the middle of Sekhmet’s palace, knowing that I had been literally dropped at her doorstep, meant something. Clearly, I just had to figure out what that something was. It didn’t necessarily mean that he was gone, but that I had to decide what it meant.

I couldn’t clear my head long enough to come to a conclusion, so I experimented instead.

I “forgot” to make his coffee. I hadn’t had the same emotional willingness to make his coffee anyway. His altar was looking pretty dusty and a bit forlorn. And I had absolutely no desire, whatsoever, to give Bawon a shot of rum on Saturdays, like I had been doing. I also felt no compunction, even though the weather was beautiful, to go to a graveyard for anything. I noticed that everything that I had wrapped up and stamped as “this is something to do with the lwa” had absolutely no fucking interest for me whatsoever. So, I “forgot” to make his coffee and heard nothing.

There was no “honey-child” in that tone of voice.

There was nothing.

I kept “forgetting” throughout the week and when Saturday dawned, I didn’t go to the graveyard. I didn’t even move from my bed for an hour upon waking, glaring angrily at the ceiling. I felt nothing, nothing and yet more nothing. None of the feelings of things that I had to do were stirring at all. So, I stayed at home and no one got any alcohol and I just moped about, doing nothing, while I threw all of the lwa related worries on the back burner.

Guilt-ridden that following Monday, I made a cup of coffee, but no companionable silence or conversations of epic proportions. There was still no one in the garden or in the forest; there was still nothing anywhere. My reasonable explanations were beginning to disappear in the face of all of this fucking nothingness. And of course, it’s not very much as though I could reach out to Sekhmet and ask her what the fuck was going on. I was supposed to be kneeling on a dais, doing nothing, while my body attempted to heal a newly installed seeping wound in my side. She would go on about exacerbating the condition and defying her: two conversations I wasn’t interested in having.

But above all else, I couldn’t have that conversation with her because I was worried about what she would say.

I couldn’t help but think that my bonding had done a lot of changing in relationships and the lwa were affected by it.

I went back through the memories of my bonding ceremony, trying to remember the last time I had actually seen Papa.

“The last thing I remembered was crying to Papa, asking him to let me stay for a little longer. I had asked him to let me stay out of fear and anxiety. He, of course, denied my request as I had already knew he would. He could not allow me to stay. I had things to attend to. What bothered me most about this situation was that I had been left on her doorstep – I knew without even remembering that was the case – and now I was here. I had decisions to make, he had schooled me, and now I couldn’t run away to ignore those decisions.“

Had those decisions that he knew I had to make changed our relationship so drastically that he was missing? That he, and all of his compatriots, weren’t allowed around me anymore? And maybe, they shouldn’t be around me anymore? Was my tear-stained begging of him my final fucking goodbye? What a shitty fucking goodbye.

So, the lwa have been missing since Lent was over. No matter how much searching I’ve done, either in my soul or in that other place, has brought them to me. I don’t know if my decision making caused this or if this is for my own good. I remember what it was like to say goodbye to Hekate – fear, worry, excitement – and know that other goodbyes with other deities are coming down the pike. I just don’t know if I have the strength and the ability to admit that the worst-case scenario has come to pass. And I just don’t know if I have the strength and ability right now to say goodbye on my end.

All I know is that they’re all missing.

And I have decisions to make.

Lent 2014 Revisited.

When I first decided to observe Lent this year, I didn’t really think anything would change. I figured, like last year, I would go into this with the intent of giving up something really important to me (diet Coke; diet Coke; diet fucking Coke) and take a much needed break from the craziness that was my relationship with Sekhmet. And then, on top of that, I would get to spend a bunch of extra time with Papa Legba, who is always a treasure to spend time with. It was a lose-win-win, I guessed, because I was giving up something really important to me (diet Coke; diet Coke; diet fucking Coke), but it was also a win because I could take about a trillion steps back from Sekhmet. And of course, Papa Legba. I have to admit, the amount of intensity I had reserved for looking forward to taking a break from Sekhmet was unparalleled by anything save the impending birth of my son. (Let’s face it – any pregnant woman will tell you how very much they are looking forward to the fetus within finally being removed.) I went into this with certain ideas and beliefs about what I was going to get.

The Road Not Taken by dusky-inc via dA

I didn’t expect to actually take the time to discover what Lent was actually about and find ways to apply it to the religious situation I live now. What was so surprising was how easy it was to pull the basic concepts behind Lent out of the dogma related to it and utilize it in a way that better helped me to define and remind myself what my religious life is about. I found that, while there are some aspects to Lent that are intrinsically tied to the Christian background from whence it comes, there are also aspects of it that anyone can use to help them realign and reinterpret what their religious needs should be and what their religious path should look like. I wasn’t expecting the amount of introspection that I delved into in a better attempt to understand why I needed the break, what I needed the break from, and what decisions, if any, I would make when it was time to look back at things.

What I wholly didn’t expect was the fact that as much as I was taking time off from Kemeticism as a whole, and Sekhmet in specific, I found myself thinking about it all too often.

However, it wasn’t as painful as it had been before the break happened. Leading up to Lent, things got incredibly painful for me. Thinking about my religious path ended, more often than not, with me burnt out, crying, and/or overly anxious. Things had been so difficult for me with Sekhmet and the initiatory rites she had me go through that to think about them was to leave me in physical pain from the amount of bullshit I felt I was being inundated with. The intensity with which I looked forward to my break was mostly because I was at my wit’s end, I was at the breaking point. I was seriously considering just giving it all up and shoving it away from me. I couldn’t seem to handle it anymore. I spent so much time, screaming unintelligibly or crying quietly to myself that the thought of even remotely continuing was too much. I knew that if something didn’t break, I was going to.

And then, like magic or more like the turning of the calendar, there was Lent. It was coming up and Papa Legba had said, “I need you to learn about Lent and I need you to not religion, can you do that?” And here I was thinking just to myself about how much I needed to not religion and there was an opening. Papa Legba was giving me a way out, temporarily at least, of the overload of emotions I was having regarding my religious tradition. And I went running to it so very hard and so very fast that I didn’t even stop to consider the nuance, the reason, or even what consequences might occur with what he was asking me. I didn’t stop to consider how this may or may not impact my religious path when I came back to it, if I bothered to go back to it. I was so focused in the idea of taking a break so that I could analyze myself and my feelings before making a, quite possibly, big huge and horrible fucking mistake by leaving everything behind on the spur of the moment. So, I went running ahead and I said, “I will not religion and I will learn about Lent.”

Every day, I would wake up and go through the motions. I still left out offerings and I still put on my religious-related jewelry, but I made a studious effort to ignore whatever emotional upheaval I was going through. With each passing day, the upheaval and turmoil grew less and less insistent. It began to fade. Just like with a wound – it started to scar. Only the healing took a good deal longer than a simple cut on the finger or on the leg. Instead of needing a few days for the wound to knit itself back together, I needed a couple of weeks. And in that time as I distanced myself from the hurt and the pain, I found that I could think more and more clearly about what steps, if any, I was going to take once I came back from the Lenten season. I found myself able to understand better what Sekhmet’s ultimate goals were, whether I knew specifically what they were, and what she was hoping to achieve.

I was becoming far more rational with each passing day and I hardly noticed.

As time went on, I began to look into Lent, as I had promised Papa I would do. When I started reading about baptism, I was shocked at the meaning behind what baptism was. According to what I found, it’s, more or less, an initiatory rite. And hadn’t I gone through one, not that long before? I felt, a little, as though I was being trolled. However, instead of just sighing in disgust and giving up, I kept up the research and ended up turning it back around to my own religious tradition. I had gone through an initiatory rite. Instead of having water placed upon my head, I had been forced to go through a very grueling and painful process, one that my soul has been building up to for many, many lives. And there’s something to be said here about the different types of initiations that one can go through. In Christianity, it is a simple decision. In Kemeticism, or more specifically in Sekhmet’s line of work, it is a death coupled with the re-forging of one’s soul to meet the needs and desires the deity in question has in mind.

I’m not saying, specifically, that this is what can be expected always when it comes to initiatory rites with Sekhmet or even with the NTRW. I’m just saying that in this particular instance, I had to die in order to be reborn into the instrument that Sekhmet wanted me to become. Death is never a pleasant experience and this particular death was not what I wanted. I understand the necessity of it, but that doesn’t mean I had to like it. I also understood and even accepted the necessity of the work I had to do in the pit at her behest, but that doesn’t mean I had to like it. And I didn’t. I was helping people, in many ways of course, but the work was dirty, painful, and hard to stomach day in and day out. The initiatory rite that I went through with her was so fucking painful and so distressing, but it was a necessity.

Just like a baptism is a necessity to enter into Christianity.

When I started looking into The Scrutinies, I found that while I couldn’t celebrate it the way that the Catholics could, I could at least take the message to heart. I found myself scrutinizing myself as deeply as I possibly could and found so much broken inside. Instead of just finding doubt, anxiety, and worry, I also found shards of broken glass in the middle of my heart and in the roots of my soul. I found that amid my very core, I could traverse the wilderness within and found that everything there hurt. It was a hurt borne of angst and anger; a hurt borne of confusion and fear; it was a hurt borne of not understanding and worrying; it was a hurt borne of the shattering of whatever illusions I had carved for myself in regards to Sekhmet. Everything within was a broken, discarded horror story that left me so filled with breathless sadness that I could barely stare at myself in the mirror anymore. What I saw was someone who was insufficient and quite possibly mentally unbalanced. I found someone who I didn’t like looking to.

So, I set about picking up the pieces the best ways I knew how.

I relaxed.

I calmed.

I told myself not to worry.

And when I broke those demands to stop worrying, I did everything in my power to toss myself away from those thoughts. I read heavily. I watched a lot of crap TV. I played games with the family.

I did everything I could to force myself away from all of that so that I could pick and choose what needed to be fixed and what needed to be discarded. The barren wilderness of my core was healing itself. From burnt out husk to partially green pasture in a few days. It seemed that by staying away from it all, I was doing far more work on healing myself and my broken promises. It was almost as if, by leaving it all alone, the mysterious inner workings of my soul were doing whatever the hell they needed to do in order to repair the damage. All I had to do was keep going and continue to make sure that I left that barren wilderness alone. I’ve looked back some since the moment that I walked out of my core and saw that desolation and have been shocked to find so many new things growing and even growth on older things…

With each passing day, as I would put on my heart-shaped ring, I would think about all of the things I wasn’t doing and wasn’t going to think about. With each night, as I would take my heart-shaped ring off, I saw the dark marks around my finger and sometimes, had to massage the feeling back into my finger. I was beginning to associate the heart, the ring, and the relationship with a heavy weight. And I think that the association with a heavy weight is important. By not taking it seriously, I could end up in hotter water than I’ve already been in or I could make things worse for myself. But with each day, instead of feeling angry or embittered about it, I began to feel calmer, cooler, more detached. And then as yet more time passed, I found myself feeling less detached and more intense. I was almost… looking forward to putting the heavy ring back upon my finger. I was beginning to remember why I had started all of this in the first place.

I went into Lent thinking that I was going to take time off, give up some diet Coke, see a whole ton of Papa Legba and learn about Lent.

I did take time off and it was worth it. I was able to remove myself from the emotional situation I was in and discover that I understood the nature in what was needed of me. And while I forgot, for a while, that my religion makes me happy towards the end of the initiatory rites I was going in, I remembered what it was about this religion that makes me happy. I was able to remind myself that while, yes I am in service to a god, I am also in this for me. And that includes doing the things that make me happy and make my feel worthy and remind me that I am living in ma’at. That includes reminding myself that while everything was really shitty for a while, it’s not always going to be that way. Rockiness is a natural part to any relationship, whether it is a relationship in the realm of the living, the realm of the dead, the realm of the astral, or the realm of the gods. Nothing is static and we can’t expect it to be. I needed to remember that everything changes and sometimes, it can be so hard to remember that as hard as the chaos of the initial change may be that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad change.

I did give up some diet Coke. I went the full forty days without having a single sip. I’ve been inundated with ads on Facebook and Tumblr for it. I’ve found myself surfing websites and there would be a diet Coke ad. I thought that perhaps, at the end of this, I could give up diet Coke completely. I found out that without having diet Coke around, I am more of an emotional mess than I was with it in my life. I also found that I have far less patience with work while drinking bottles of water versus diet Coke. It’s possible that the weight less I’ve experienced in the last month was due to giving up diet Coke, but I’ve also found that I am not a very good person without it in my life. It is an addiction and I understand the health risks wrapped up in that addiction. But it is my addiction and for fuck’s sake, I really like diet Coke.

I hardly saw Papa Legba at all this round. I felt his presence, occasionally, in the morning or at random times throughout the day. Sometimes, I would dream of the two of us in a garden or in the forest. He was always making something grow. He’s very good at getting things to grow, as I’ve found out. What I didn’t seem to realize until only just recently that each change in the scenery, the overall goal was the same: he was creating a garden and needed to nurture it. We talked a lot about the nature of what nurturing a garden was like and how that relates back to the nurturing one must do for themselves. He told me jokes and he told me stories. He said to me last night that it’s time for me to go back to where I belong; the lesson is over. And it was a lesson and a half. He wasn’t just giving me a way out of the really oppressive atmosphere I was in, but he was also helping me to grow, my core, my soul, and everything in between. He was busy nurturing the fledgling plants and the older plants that had been accidentally pinched out when I became so angry and so embittered.

I learned a lot about Lent. I learned about how it relates to Catholicism, but I also learned that the overall lessons for Lent can easily be turned back to focus on anyone else’s religious path. I also found out that the goals behind the Lenten season can, also, be brought to bear in any religious tradition. And it was in that lesson that, I think, I was able to really overcome the aggression, the anger, and the bitterness that I had been feeling for the six months or so before Lent started. It was because Papa Legba had asked me to learn about it that I was able to achieve introspective heights and understand, remind myself, and remember what it was I had started this whole path for.

I started on this path, all those years ago, not just because I heard the call of a goddess whose songs have been sung in my heart for hundreds of years, but also because I found a place where I belong, where I am comfortable, and where I am happy.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Lent 2014.

Last year, just prior to the Lenten season, I began to dream about Gran Bwa. I can remember those dreams – I was searching for him. He was walking ahead of me, wearing a mask, but I knew who it was. He never spoke to me, or if he did, I never remembered what it was he said or those parts of the dream. But I can remember following after him, attempting to catch up with him so that I could ask him what he was doing in my dreams. Around the same time, I began to dream about Papa Legba in that veritable forest-of-my-dreams that I now associate almost exclusively with Gran Bwa. On nights where Papa Legba showed up, we mostly sat in companionable silence around a large bonfire. Sometimes, we would talk, but he never answered my questions about Gran Bwa. All he would ever tell me was that it would be up to me to decide why I was following after him and what it was that was supposed to mean. I back-burnered those dreams because I couldn’t make heads nor tails of them. I figured when it was time for me to figure out what in the world was going on, then I’d figure it out.

On Ash Wednesday last year, I drove by the Catholic Church the way I did every day on my way to work. And I can remember seeing that the parking lot was very full and I remember wondering to myself, what in the world is going on? I did some quick calculations in my head and realized that the Lenten season had begun. I thought about what, to me, Lent meant. In my brain, it meant that you started everything off with ashes upon your brow and then gave things up that meant a lot to you. Most of my experience, to that point, with the whole concept stemmed from conversations I had overheard from my Catholic family members and from Catholic employees. One of my past employees … I remembered, on that drive, she had begged to go to church to get the ashes on her brow during her shift and I covered her shift while she was gone. When she came back, she gave up lottery tickets and swearing – two things that were inherently a part of her – for the next forty days and we all made sure she stuck to it. That moment was a turning point in my life, something I didn’t fully understand and even a year later, I hardly understand it now.

That was my first time attempt to celebrate Lent. In the grand scheme of things, I failed. And with it went a lot of other things that I ended up failing at. I felt, back then, that it was Gran Bwa pushing me to observe the sacrifice. And I still believe that it was him with those dreams and the odd music choices that would come on the radio when I was contemplating those dreams that led me to observe Lent last year. Since I ended up failing at sacrifice, I felt as though I was failing Gran Bwa. Twelve months later, I still feel more than a modicum of guilt at having eaten the chocolate cake. I started over, of course, after that failure but it felt less… pure and less willing. By then, it felt like I was wearing clothes too tight for me and I was uncomfortable. I had fucked up. I had to learn the lesson – I suck at the sacrifice shit – and move on. Gran Bwa stopped visiting me in dreams and I was pretty sure the two more than just a little tied together.

What I failed to understand was that the whole thing – Lenten season and what I saw it as – was incorrect. I had to do more research.

As I said back then, and I’ve commented on since, I wasn’t ever raised as a Catholic. Lent season, in my eyes, tends to be held in a different sort of reverence with Catholics than it does with other sects. I was raised in the Methodist church and I honestly can’t remember doing anything for Lent. I just checked out my childhood church’s website and noted that yes, there are things that they do for the Lenten season. Perhaps the amount of sacrifice or the amount of reverie isn’t as intense as it is with Catholics and that’s why I think Catholics feel it more intently? I honestly don’t know where this feeling stems from. I don’t remember my mother ever giving anything up for Lent when I was a child and whatever conversations I overheard from my maternal family about it are very watery and distant. Looking at all of this, I had to admit that I don’t know shit.

Why is this important to Papa Legba? Why is observing Lent important to the voodoo things that I do? What does all of this mean?

So, I started doing some research. I read this FAQ about it to get me going. I have to admit that a lot of what I was reading made me uncomfortable. I’m not a Catholic, nor do I intend on becoming one. There are bits and pieces of the religious tradition that I always found interesting and something beautiful, but the overall message that it sends out there has always made me uncomfortable. Hell, let’s be frank: organized religion on such a mass scale is the problem. I don’t like it. I think religion should be something personal and individual, but you can’t do that with the Christian traditions that I have taken part in. You have to have the community and the man or woman at the pulpit, telling you what to do and how to do it. That is what bothers me. God, Bondye, Super Nebulous Void Guy, whatever – whatever relationship that is built should be based on the needs and requirements of the soul looking for that connection. But that’s not all that has gotten me while reading up on this stuff.

This quote is something that makes me uncomfortable: “The key to understanding the meaning of Lent is simple: Baptism. Preparation for Baptism and for renewing baptismal commitment lies at the heart of the season.” The act of baptism has always baffled me. In many traditions, we put some water over a child’s head and christen them into a set denomination. That, in and of itself, bothers me. My son is not baptized and he won’t be unless he makes a decision to do so. I think, part of the reason why baptism has always bothered me is because it’s a decision, again like the relationship with deity, in which someone should be able to make on their own and not be made by their parents. I think another reason why it baffles me is because, again, I think relationships with deity need to be a personal thing. While I do acknowledge that the laity need priests to act as intermediaries, I don’t think it’s on the same level that priests and reverends are utilized in many Christian traditions. (I’m sorry if this isn’t very clear. It’s all kind of a *speechless in an attempt to explain*.) Back to the quote: my discomfiture mostly stems from someone’s parents making a huge commitment on behalf of a baby and then forcing them to see it through until the end of time or until they’re finally old enough to make their own decisions.

But, let’s go back to that – the parents make a decision for their children. And then the children are expected to follow through on that decision until they are old enough to make their own religious decisions. But the quote doesn’t talk about that. It talks about a renewal of the baptismal commitment. So, in a way, it’s like the Church is openly acknowledging that baptismal commitments need to be reconnected. Okay, but is that because childrens’ parents make a decision for them or is that just because they may be lacking in a few key areas? I don’t know. And because this is all very new and weird territory for me, this is why it makes me very uncomfortable and I feel weird discussing it. But these are things that I have to address because I guess I promised to do this every year. So, I need to stop being uncomfortable and make some decisions.

One day.

Even though the first part of that FAQ had me questioning a million things, I kept reading. I had other things to look into, of course, because Lent is more than just giving things up, right? So, I kept going. And of course, there was a section about giving things up. I read the section on it, brow furrowed. Then I got to this part: “Lent is about conversion, turning our lives more completely over to Christ and his way of life. That always involves giving up sin in some form. The goal is not just to abstain from sin for the duration of Lent but to root sin out of our lives forever. Conversion means leaving behind an old way of living and acting in order to embrace new life in Christ.” Well, that actually explained it better than I ever could. And it made me understand things a little bit better. It wasn’t just an act of giving things up because, hey let’s do that! But it was about giving lives over to Christ and to his way of life as well as to give up sins. That didn’t sit well with me, either.

I know this is because, again, I’m coming at all of this from a different perspective than most. The concept of Christian sin has always confused me. It varies from sect to sect, honestly. Some people would see it as a sin to “be a homosexual,” (as if there is a choice involved) while other sects do not find this sinful at all. I mean, sins as they exist according to doctrine are pretty complicated things. It’s more than just breaking the Ten Commandments because there’s so much more in the world that constitutes as a sin. The thing is that some of the things other people give up don’t seem to be sins, in my eyes. Someone I know is giving up potatoes. (She’s not Catholic and this is actually an experiment or something for one of her college classes, but people give up food all the time. I gave up chocolate last year.) Is eating potatoes a sin? Is eating chocolate a sin? No. But there are people out there who give up eating certain foods. They give up drinking a certain drink. They give up all manner of things, but is it really an act of giving up sin?

How many people can really say that they come out of the Lenten season free of sin?

And again, I keep coming back to that word. I don’t like it. It doesn’t sit right with me at all. Maybe it’s because in Kemeticism we don’t really have a concept like that. We have living in ma’at and not living in ma’at. There’s no middle ground. There’s no accidental “sin” in which we may be isfet briefly and then go right back to being in ma’at. The 42 Divine Utterances are hardly even an indicator about what is or is not considered living in ma’at since they changed from person to person – but that’s my overall view on this religion stuff, isn’t it? Whatever constitutes “sin,” whether it be of a religious nature or otherwise, is up to the person who is giving up that sin. Minus the bit about Christ and his way of life, since I don’t follow that in any way, it makes more sense and that bit about sin makes me less uncomfortable.

I kept reading because the next part was very interesting. It talks about “The Scrutinies.” This was whole new territory to me because I had never even heard about that shit before. What was that about? This stood out to me: “To scrutinize something means to examine it closely. The community does not scrutinize the catechumens; the catechumens scrutinize their own lives and allow God to scrutinize them and to heal them.” But who were the catechumens and how come they were the only ones scrutinizing? Why can’t everyone scrutinize? Why can’t they all put everything under a microscope and make some mass decisions about what’s going on deep inside? “There is a danger in celebrating the Scrutinies if the community thinks of the elect as the only sinners in our midst who need conversion. All of us are called to continuing conversion throughout our lives, so we join with the elect in scrutinizing our own lives and praying to God for the grace to overcome the power of sin that still infects our hearts.” Well, that answered that question.

So, scrutinizing one’s life is pretty much a no-brainer, it’s part and parcel. And if you’re not part of the elect because you’ve already been baptized, then you get to go through the Sacrament of Penance.

And that’s when I kind of put it all together. I realized that this wasn’t really an act of sacrifice, although sacrifice is definitely a part of what I’ve been asked to do. But it’s also about Scrutiny and it’s also about Silence. It’s also about Patience and it’s also about Introspection and Reflection. But above all, this time is about me and my needs. This isn’t about Papa Legba. This isn’t about Gran Bwa. This isn’t about Sekhmet. This isn’t about Djehuty, Hetheru, Aset, Wesir, the community, the bigger picture, or anything in between. This entire experience is about me because I am important. My wants and needs are important. What I need to bring to the metaphoric table is absolutely fucking important. And I need to remember that. I need to take time away from the heavy hitters and away from everything that’s been pounding down on my head for the last few months, take a bunch of deep breaths, and reflect, introspect, scrutinize, decide.

This year, I went into Lent with a different perspective. I knew a little bit more about what the basis of Lent was, for starters. I had done what I should have done last year and actually looked things up. While I’ve admitted, here, that a lot of what I read didn’t agree with me or left me feeling uncomfortable, vaguely confused, and generally feeling like the overall message for Catholics didn’t quite fit with me, I’ve come to understand the basic premise in the tradition. I get it. Or at least I am beginning to.

This year, I went into Lent knowing that I would be giving up a major part of my life. I gave up diet Coke. People reading this might laugh at me, but I don’t think you understand how much diet Coke I drink. I drink a lot of it, every day. It’s a staple to me, as much as milk and coffee are. But I knew I had to do something bigger than just chocolate. I can handle not having chocolate for forty days (even if I’m too stupid to remember that I’m eating chocolate cake). Chocolate isn’t as important to me as diet Coke is. So, I knew that I wanted to give up a staple in my life. I gave up diet Coke and I’ll admit, every day, I think about drinking diet Coke. Someone said that it gets better after a while. It’s Saturday, so I haven’t had any diet Coke since Tuesday. There’s a bottle in the fridge and I open that refrigerator up, purse my lips in sadness, and move away. The caffeine headaches are a bitch, but they’re getting a little better each day. If I come out of this never drinking diet Coke ever again, I’ll be surprised. If I stop thinking about diet Coke longer than a few hours at a time, I’ll think it’s a miracle.

I miss diet Coke, damn it.

This year, I went into Lent know that I would be giving up another major part of my life. I gave up my religious side of things. I have rites and services scheduled for Sekhmet, of course, and Papa Legba is big on keeping one’s promises. But I’m not doing anything else. This isn’t about the netjeru anymore. This is about my life. So, I gave up my religion, so to speak, to incorporate a religious tradition that doesn’t sit well with me in an effort to better understand myself, my religious practice, and everything in between. I know that kind of sounds weird, right? But there’s something to that adage about letting birds fly free because if it’s meant to be, it’ll come back to you? I’ve always found that when I request a break from the netjeru, then they don’t live up to their end of the bargain for whatever reason. Things get pushed forward, things about the bigger picture usually, and I end up getting sucked in. But not this year, not for these next forty days.

No religion. No diet Coke.

For someone who was pretty big about faith and stuff just two years ago and for someone who was drinking three 20oz bottles of diet Coke a day, well, that’s a lot.

But this is about reflection, introspection. This is about fleshing out a more solid foundation for me, which includes the lwa.

And that, honestly, is something that I only just realized. Papa Legba, Gran Bwa – whomever – they weren’t really wanting me to pay attention to the religious observance, per se. They wanted me to pay attention to me. They wanted me to take care of myself. And part of that includes them. They always get sent to the backseat because there’s always something important going on with the netjeru. And that’s just no good. I’m supposed to be serving them and too often, I find my services lacking because I’m too caught up in shit for Sekhmet, shit for the community, and other miscellaneous horse shit. Last year, I said that it was all about balance, but the last part of the year and the first two months of this year have been everything-Sekhmet. And while I understand the need to push and get me to where I am today, I’ve kind of had it.

I chose Papa Legba as much as he chose me all those years ago.

The least I can do is remember that and act on it and say, “No,” when I need to.

Right now, I’m saying, “no.” I’m saying it to Sekhmet, my religion, my diet Coke.

And I’m reminding myself that foundations are important.

Foundations are always, always important.

And there is no foundation without me.

New Year’s Day 2014.

Something I’ve never really discussed regarding the lwa is how very important giving thanks to them is. It’s one thing to not provide thanks to the gods for items they do for you – the relationship is kind of different in many cases when it comes to how we devote to our gods. However, while some relationships with the gods can and will take on a sort of partnership, this isn’t the case with the lwa. They require that thanks be provided to them for things they’ve given you. If you fail to provide thanks to the lwa then things can and will get a lot worse for you after they’ve given whatever it is that you asked them for. I would like to think that I’m getting better at remembering to give thanks to the lwa but sometimes, in a fit of fear that I’m failing somewhere, I end up going up and above the norm in an effort to remind myself, and them, that I truly am thankful for all that they have provided.

There appears to be two separate ways to provide thanks to the lwa, at least as far as my research has indicated. There is the ability to provide an intimate thanksgiving between the servant and the lwa in question. And then there is a larger ceremony known as the action de grace. From the little bit I’ve found regarding this topic, it doesn’t seem like this happens quite often and that it is definitely a ceremony that non-initiates wouldn’t partake in. Since I am not initiated into anything, I had decided that what I was providing was simply my giving thanks and nothing more. While the phrase, action de grace, is how I was gently reminded that I had things to provide thanks for, I don’t believe that the lwa to whom I needed to provide my gratitude for were looking for a non-initiate’s attempt at recreating an action de grace rite. Besides, since that particular ceremony appears to be something that a Sosyete would celebrate without any outsiders, I didn’t really know how to go about something like that. So, instead, I decided that I just needed to give a hearty “thank you.”

Papa Legba, in the last few months more specifically, has given me a lot of assistance on items that I didn’t think he would be able to help me out with. Just as I’ve given thanks to Bawon Samedi for his timely assistance financially last summer – and ended up paying for failing to say “thank you” in a timely manner – I knew that I couldn’t let this one sit. Papa Legba is more patient than most of the lwa, but he is not above messing things about in order to make the point stick. So, I knew that I needed to do something really grandiose and awesome for him while also trying to keep the rite simple and intimate. He really, really assisted me in a lot of ways in the white room that I can’t even begin to detail – and won’t – and he also has just been a sort of constancy as I wander around, feeling vaguely odd and mostly lost. With his ability to be as steadfast as he has been, I decided to give him a surfeit of thanks on New Year’s Day.

New Year’s Day is a day dedicated to Papa Legba in many traditions. The first day of the year is the start of a new cycle, or in parlance that is more easily associated with him: it’s a day about opening the gateway, to bust through obstacles, and to bring new opportunities to people who need them and/or request those new opportunities. While all of these things are super important and things I should probably request assistance with in the coming year, this wasn’t really about me and my needs. This was about him and his needs. As I was thinking about how I wanted my thanksgiving to go the day before New Year’s Eve, I knew that I didn’t just want to provide him my own thanks, but to offer his ability to bust through some shit and bring in some good shit to others. So, I sent out a little invitation to anyone who was wanting to get some aid from Papa Legba. This was a two-fold adventure for me: I was providing him a meal, dedicated to him, in thanks for all he’s done for me. And I was also providing a sort of miniature service for others who needed help, but didn’t really know where to get that help from.

Part of the reason I got the idea is because I’ve found myself, in the last two months, looking forward to and enjoying the services I’ve been providing in the name of others to Sekhmet. It seemed, to me, that Papa Legba would appreciate something as catchy as all of that. And it also seemed like a selfish thing to keep a very wonderful lwa to myself. If he has the capability to assist me with the various projects I have going on, who was I to deny his access to others? And honestly, he’s been such a solid force in my life for the last few months. Since our last interaction in the white room, I haven’t really had much going on with him. And the amount of solid foundation he really provided me within that room is something that I would really like others to be able to feel and to know. If I could open up that doorway, even just a little, for others, then I thought, well, why not? And to be honest, my Papa Legba is very much a flashy kind of lwa who likes to get as much attention as he can (when he feels it appropriate). And if the day of New Year’s wasn’t appropriate, then what day really would be?

I managed to put a quick menu for the meal together very quickly. This, in all honesty, is one of the big lures with voodoo. It’s not all of it, but a large part is the fact that it’s about what you have versus what you need. While I attempt to balance myself properly between the gods and the lwa, I sometimes feel like the lwa appreciate who I am, what I have on hand, and what I can pull out of my butt with those items more than the gods. In many instances, I feel that my gods need a bit more in order for my success. It’s possible that I’m building too much into something that isn’t even an issue, but occasionally, I feel more powerful and successful in the minor rites I create alongside or for the lwa than I do for the gods. In either case, Papa Legba told me to plan out the menu based on things he knew that I knew he would enjoy and to add one single special touch: he wanted me to find chocolate that had orange rinds in it or that was orange-flavored. I looked up the meaning for orange peels in one of my herbal books and found that it is associated with “general good luck.”

This gave me the grand idea of where I wanted to go with the petition services I was going to provide. I was going to push out the specific requests, of course, but I wanted it all couched under the auspices of “general good luck.”

There were a couple of other items that I did need to go out and get for him, though. While grocery shopping this past weekend, I kept my eyes peeled for the requested orange flavored chocolate. I ended up finding some on sale at my local grocery store. I also found other items that I thought Papa Legba would like added to this meal on sale. It really felt like things were working in our favor. I was able to [finally] get the requested pineapple and it was on sale! I bought chunks of it versus the actual thing since I don’t actually know how to cut it or skin it. (As a kid, fruits were things that were common, like apples and bananas and oranges and nectarines. We didn’t really move outside our comfort zone when it came to fruits. I still don’t move outside of my comfort zone with fruits because whenever I attempt to, I end up screwing things up or forgetting it’s in the house.) I also managed to find some red beans and rice on super sale and I bought that to go with the chicken meal I was planning.

Everything I was planning here, by the way, had a certain set of symbolism that correlates with my Papa Legba. Rice is something he’s asked of me a few times and he seems to enjoy it. It’s also incredibly cheap and stuff that I usually have on hand. Since the box of red beans and rice was on sale, it seemed like another kind of mini sign post that this was something important. Plus, it had red beans in it and one of his core colors if red. The chicken meat hearkened back to Papa Legba’s symbolism with the black rooster that I read in a book or three. The chocolate is something that all of the lwa have a flare for, but I prefer to get flavored kinds that, again, hearken back to things that they’ve requested of me. While I attempt to use a lot of symbolism in any rite that I perform for any of the gods or the lwa in my life, I really attempt to pay closer attention when I’m planning on something on a grander scale than I normally would provide.

While I waited for everything to cook, I wrote out the handful of petitions I received. I thought about how I wanted to supply the petitions to Papa Legba. Basing it, similarly, to how I provide them to Sekhmet, I ended up writing them down on small pieces of paper. It took me longer to write down the petitions than I had initially thought it would because of how I needed to word them carefully in order to make their requests plain. I also needed to figure out how, specifically, I wanted to metaphorically help these people break through the blocks. I got an idea while looking at Papa Legba’s altar. Once Hekate left the house, she left behind a very nice lantern. Since both she and Papa Legba are of the liminal sort, I placed it on his altar after she was gone. Staring at it, I knew what I wanted to achieve.

In between rubbing out the writer’s cramp I was getting while writing the petitions (my handwriting is very precise, especially when I’m writing out petitions for others, so I have to stop after a while to rub out the cramps in my hands), I continued to set my table service. I had purchased red and white linen napkins the day before. I used these as the basis for the “canvas” I was creating. I placed them in a sort of diamond pattern and then began placing some of the items I have on Papa Legba’s altar onto the table. I placed the candle holder with his vévé on it, the paket that was made for me that is kind of like my “doll” of him, and his wooden bowl on the table. I recreated a little symbolism in front of his “doll” for the petitions I was placing: I added his three dice, three pennies, and three cowrie shells in a sort of pattern atop the wooden bowl I keep on his altar, as well. Finally, I added three keys in front of him, as well.

Once I had finished with the petitions, I set them up first since I still had some time to kill before the meal was ready.

All lit and supplied to the Old Man.

I placed all nine petitions on the white offering plate I have for just such a purpose. I placed tea lights over each of the written petitions, as well. Since I had fewer petitions than I have in the rites I’ve performed for Sekhmet, I was able to “set lights,” sort of, for these people. Unlike with the traditional hoodoo rite of setting lights, I didn’t use the seven-day candles and I didn’t use candles specific to the purposes each petitioner was requesting. I did, however, dress the white tea lights. I anointed them with some success oil I have on hand. I also dressed the entire plate with herbs that were relating back to the “general good luck” that I wanted to create. I wanted to be able to give the people asking for assistance their own power in finding the way to break through the blocks in an effort to draw the new opportunities to them. Back to my obsession with symbolism: that was why I chose to use the lantern in this rite. I wanted them to have a lighted way through the darkness that blockages of varying sorts can cause in people and if I lit the lantern, symbolically, they would be able to “see” the light and follow it through the blocks preventing them from seeing the new opportunities coming in their lives.

The whole shebang.

After I had completed that part of the work, I was able to set the meal out. I put the main course out first (with a fork) so that Papa Legba could feast upon that either while he perused the requests before him or after he was finished with it. I added the various other items I had on hand for him: a cup of coconut and orange-flavored chocolate; a mug of hot coffee that was laced with a flavored Bailey’s nip I had been given for Christmas; the last shot of his coconut rum; and the chunks of pineapple that was covered in cheese. The cheese was the only thing that I didn’t associate with him. I provided him the cheese as a symbolic sacrifice. Cheese is a very big and important staple in our lives. We all love cheese in this household. I will buy a pound of American cheese and just munch on it whenever, though I prefer to munch down on extra sharp cheddar more than American cheese. But the point was that I was offering him a sacrifice of one of our most favored items and I was placing it over the pineapple as a secondary sacrifice. I would eat it later and it would be “tainted” with the taste of pineapple (I don’t like the taste of pineapple or of coconut – two items that he does enjoy).

Once everything was set before him so that he could pick and choose what he sampled, I lit the candles of the petitions first, followed by three spare candles I added at the last minute.

I have a whole host of plain white candles lazing around my house. I added three candles beneath his “throne” on the table and anointed them with the same success oil. I then lit them to provide success to the nine petitioners. The last candle I lit was the one in the lantern. Again, this was a symbolic gesture. The first candles lit were the nine requests placed before him, as a kind of first step to breaching through their blocks and attaining their ultimate goals. The three candles placed directly in front of his “throne” and just in front of the offering plate of petitions was to keep him focused on them. And lastly, I lit the lantern to provide the people, finally, with the light at the end of the tunnel that many of them needed in order to realize their ultimate goals.

While Papa Legba was eating, I sat down beside him and enjoyed a cup of Bailey’s laced coffee with him. While the two of us enjoyed his meal together, I told him how grateful I was for everything he’s provided me in the last few months. I specifically explained to him what I was thankful for and what this service was about. But, I also detailed other things he has given me over the last few years with him in his life. Teary-eyed towards the end of my list of reasons why I was so appreciative of all he’s done for me and how happy I am to have him in my life, I told him that I didn’t think I would have survived all the shit that’s been thrown at me if he wasn’t around. And while I don’t know what-all we’re doing with this camaraderie between us, I appreciated it and wouldn’t trade it for all the gold in the world. I’m not certain of I was able to convey, fully, how I feel about him and how thankful I truly am, but I would like to hope that he received the point.

Completed petitions. Lower right hand candle shows the dark soot.

After our shared cup of coffee, I was exhausted. I felt like I had run a marathon, or as if I had been up for days upon days and was only finally capable of falling asleep. While I rested, I let the petition candles burn out throughout the night. I was hoping that, in the morning, I would look at them and see that the petition was a success. (I didn’t actually get to look at them until yesterday.) By candle standards go, the petition was a success, mostly. There was a single candle that burned itself black. Since I had been careful to not allow too many of the “general good luck” herbs I had sprinkled over the petitions to remain on top of the tea lights, I was curious as to the meaning here. In looking at the pictures I took of the services, I do see that there was a thicker bunch of herbs on that candle. So, it is incredibly feasible that what I am associated the blackened condition of the tea light casing (and the petition beneath) is merely a coincidence. However, in looking over the rest of the petitions, it is the only one to have ended up like this and I’m a pretty big fan of explaining away coincidences. I have already alerted the owner of that petition to the circumstances here and hopefully, they are better able to explain it away than I have been.

I learned a lot during what I was providing for Papa Legba, both in the thanksgiving meal and in the petitions I had placed before him. I realized that I actually enjoy doing this. It’s fun and it’s exciting and I feel like I’m able to really assist us others in a way that they may not be able to assist themselves with. I also learned that there is a bit of responsibility that goes along with this as well. Just because I place petitions down in front of a particular being doesn’t mean that they will succeed (as in the possible case of the lone petition that burned so black). And finally, I learned that this is something that I would like to continue to do. I would like to continue to be able to provide these types of services to Papa Legba. It’s not just fun, but it’s also very intimate and very fulfilling in a way that I didn’t realize would be the case.

All in all: A++. Would recommend again.

The Nature of Things.

Papa Legba is a fantastic story-teller. Whether this is the case with anyone else’s relationship with him remains to be seen, but he tells me very intricate stories quite often. During our travels and during our time in the white room, he has told me what feels like thousands. In many, I am the mythic heroine, fighting through whatever archetypal thing he can think up at the time. And I am always successful, which is the point in stories. One night, when we were sitting beneath a belly of stars that reminded me of the rainbow serpent, I asked him to tell me about how the world was created. Whether this is accurate or not, I cannot say. But I liked the story so much that I decided to write it down later. I’m going to reproduce it as best I can right now.

“For much time, there was nothing. This vast empty was the seat of it all. This is the table where the beginning will form and where the ending will take place. The darkened nothing was expansive and miniscule, all the same. For many eons, the nothing stretched into its forever and folded upon itself. Within the belly of that nothing, consciousness began to form, but it refused to allow that to take place. It was content with the way things were and to devolve or evolve into the form those conscious beings may take was too much. For even though the nothing was not a concrete creature as we know them today, it was still a being unto itself. But it was the largest and most powerful of all things ever created into this universe and the universes beyond. It was content with itself and stayed in this form for many years.

“After a while, the consciousness that was growing within that nothing began to take shape. It took shape in all forms and no forms. It was an egg upon a mound; it was a ben-ben; it was a beautiful creature; it was the sun/moon; it was a foothill; it was the creator; it was the creatrix; it was light; it was the mother; it was the father; it was the earth. It was everything and it was nothing. All consciousness came into being in that single moment and the universes were forever changed. Soon, they all began to create more and more, bringing life into the universe one by one. They each created to their heart’s deepest desires and created worlds beyond the scope of this tale. Suffice to say that the creation of the universe was a great party and a great festivity, but the only person not celebration was the nothing. Never one for change; that.

“In the beginning, each creator began to create life. The life that was created was a blueprint for things to come. Some creators made the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Some created everything all at once in volcanic fire and gentle rains. Some created the world in their image. Some created the world in a fantastic scope beyond which I cannot describe. Some became the world. Some became the stars that were glued to the sky. Some had children that would become their world and would become their sky. Some slit open the bellies of fantastic serpents and created the world that way. Each are different. Each world was intrinsic to the vision of the being doing the creating, but they all held the same joy and the same beauty and the same sorrow and the same fear. And in the end, they created children in the images they wanted to see staring back at them with fawning awe.

“In each world, life was not hard. The children of those creators and their brethren were happy and skillful. It was a magnificent time. And then, they began to grow old. They began to grow haggard. They began to fall away from the world of their creation and begin to pay less attention. And in that time, they all began to conspire with each other. They whispered in the ears of their siblings and they forgot about their creations. But one did not. A single being continued to watch over them on a rotational schedule. As the other gods ignored what they had made, the single watch dog began to notice something. Things had begun to grow harder and the children these beings had created began to require discipline and lessons. As none of them knew how hard things could be they didn’t know any better. And with each creation, these children – these first of the men of the gods – began to question.

“Worlds were destroyed then. Without the blind faith of their children, what were the gods?

“They started again. And the same thing happened. And they began to create life together – pantheon with pantheon – but the same thing happened. It happened over and over again. And each time, the gods destroyed their worlds, punishing their children for their own inability to care. Finally, the world was created a final time. This time, it was a single world with each god contributing here and there. And the way of the previous worlds happened again. There were questions. There was doubt. This time, the gods were tired and unable to create a new home again. With each destruction of the faithful and the non-believers alike, they had lost a core essence of themselves. They had grown hard and remote. They were no longer away. The gods kept up the charade for as long as they could, but soon only a single deity cared still to watch over the world of humans. And the other gods fell out of favor, gaining but scant attention and scant offerings from the very, very limited number of people willing to speak about them.

“Time passed, as it always does.

“The single creator began to grow tired of it all, as well. Everything grows tired. Every waxes and wanes. Now was the time in which even He waned. In that time, He realized that He could not leave humans to suffer without Him. They needed something to help them along. Their world was nothing but horror after horror and hardship after hardship. One day, He knew, the world would be more comfortable than the toil it was then. And so, He created the beings that would go to the humans when they needed someone or something. So with His final act as creator, He made beings to watch over the humans He and His brethren had created. These beings were more than humans, but less than gods. They were there to assist, to aid, to succor, to pray to, to cry to. Those children who were more than humans and less than gods were what the people turned to in their hour of need. Each being had its own name, its own titles, and their powers surged and grew.

“Those beings are still here, you know. We still watch over you when things are hard. And that is why we are here.”

That night, when he first told me this story, I was entranced. I liked the woven length of it and the feel behind it. There is a power behind every word when he speaks to me. It is the power of being the gatekeeper, but also a power that is intrinsic to who he is, without his roles behind it. The words he used were very carefully chosen for use later. When he told me this story, as I said, I was merely entranced with it. I enjoy myths and creation myths are something I’ve always been fascinated with. In many, the creation of the world is both similar and so entirely different. In either case, what Papa Legba was giving me that night was a foundation or a building block for the hard truths that would come later. I am grateful that he was able to provide me with this tale so that I could relate it back to others later and so that I would have something to hold onto when I was at my angriest.

The nature of the gods, to me, is remote. This is something that I have never really understood until now. They have always created what they wanted and always hoped for blind faith. I have given them blind faith and it is fine to do so. I don’t knock anyone who does. I know what it’s like to finally find something that speaks to you on a level that is beyond rational thought. I know what it’s like to finally give your all into something that speaks to you on that level. It is a level beyond mysticism, a level beyond souls. When it speaks to you, and you throw yourself into it, it is so beautiful and so wonderful. It fuels you in ways that you never knew you needed. This, I think, is missing from many people. The problem is that the more blind faith you give, the more they want from you. And the longer you are in their company, the less you can provide.

I am angry with the gods for being remote. They do things for their own reasons. As I’ve discussed with all of my gods, it’s all “bigger picture.” They see things so far in the future and so far beyond how I see them that I cannot begin to understand what it is that they see. I don’t see the bigger picture because all I see is the tiny little speck of perspective I have directly in front of me. One day, maybe, I will understand the bigger picture. But that is not in this life. And that is why I am so angry. They do not explain the bigger picture. They hone us as tools for whatever purpose they have. I know what my ultimate purpose will be because some beings I know aren’t liars. I know why I am being honed for what it is my gods want and it angers me. I can see more items in that bigger picture and I am not willing or likely to provide it.

I will fight it every step of the way.

But the thing is that the gods knew that they were selfish twat-waffles. They knew that at some point, the tools they were honing would become angry with them. And in that moment, they knew that they had to give them something to give them an out. They had to provide something so that the suffering they ask of us on their path to the bigger picture would ease up. And in that moment, they created these spirits and beings for us. These are the beings that we are supposed to turn to – those of us who know them – in our pain and suffering and anger and angst. They created them, or He did as in the story, to give us an out, a place to vent. They created beings who would love us unconditionally. They would love us in our rage. They would love us in our pain. They would love us in our individuality and beauty. They would love us and they do.

Papa Legba never talks to me about the “bigger picture.” He used to. He was trying to prep me, a bit, for the moment when I would become enraged. But whenever he talked about it, I would pull back from him. He realized that I wasn’t ready for it and that I never would be. And in so discussing that bigger picture, he was damaging the trust I was building in him. I have transferred that blind trust I used to give to my gods over to a being who understands the nature of what it is I am going through. He is many things and many beings in many tongues and to many different people. He shows different faces for the needs and desires of the people who reach out to him. Whatever the face is that he provides is the face he will always show them and that’s fine. It’s the one they trust to help see them through.

The bigger picture is the nature of the gods. The coping mechanisms we need to get to that bigger picture is the nature of the spirits they have given us.

And those spirits love us, in all of our fucked up glory, because that is their right and that is their purview.

Now, of course, we have to give and sacrifice to those spirits to get them. I’ve often told people that the life of a servant is difficult. It is very much like a serf. There is no out. There is no way you can leave. But in order to build a relationship with beings beyond you, you have to be willing to give. And that is something that not many people understand or are willing to give. And I think that’s why these paths can be so hard. We know that there are beings out there that are willing to help us, but we can’t sacrifice ourselves long enough to build that relationship. I was able to do so because I needed to do so. And besides, he came to me. He knew that I would need him one day and he nudged me in the right direction to get that going. So in the middle of the night, when I was crying and aching for the suffering of that “bigger picture,” he would come and hold my hand or run his fingers through my hair.

He loved me with snot running down my nose. And in gratitude, I gave vast portions of myself back.

This is the nature of the spirits whom I serve.

They are here for me in a way that the gods never will be.

And that’s good enough for me.

Disgusting.

I disgust myself.

This week has been particularly difficult for me. Each morning, I wake up with tears in my eyes. And throughout the day, the feeling of an overpowering need to cry picks up or dissipates. There is no single event that pushes me to the brink of feeling as though I need to cry. I may have been driving to work and listening to the radio host, discussing the news that morning. I may have been sitting at my desk, attempting to figure out a billing issue that’s been going on for nearly a year now. I may have been laughing with my son as I try to tickle his feet. None of these particular instances – and there are many more of same vein – that do not really make anyone sit down and say, “Why, yes. I am feeling particularly sad about this thing and so I shall cry about it.” It’s not like I cried, either. I’m not one of those “let’s cry” kind of people, though I’ve been known to force the crying issue on purpose just to have a cathartic moment after a particular bad time. Whatever the cause behind these tears, it has led me to some other parts of myself that I have not been too thrilled to look over.

My mundane life has been very hard this week, which isn’t surprising. I have about $15 to my name right now. There are things that we need in this house. I’m nearly out of deodorant and I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to steal some of TH’s to see me through before I can get to the store and purchase some. We have one roll of toilet paper, which needs to last until next weekend. (I’m thinking about asking TH to steal some from his mom’s house.) I noticed my front driver side tire is beginning to crack – similar to how the passenger side was cracking, but this time it’s near the rim and not near the tread. We’re nearly out of food since food stamps has decided to give me money each month, but has also decided that everyone needs a new card with their DMV photo on it and so, I have no card with which to use those benefits which started last month. (Since my last card was canceled in July and they decided on this picture-on-the-card thing, they won’t reactivate it so that I can feed my family.) I have about a half tank of gas, which has to last me until we get paid on Friday. So, I can’t go anywhere this weekend – such as to TH’s mother’s house to steal toilet paper – just to be on the safe side. It takes me about a quarter tank of gas to get to and from work each day, so I am going to have to borrow money, I think.

This has all added up – amid other things that I haven’t quite been stewing about in the last twenty four hours on the financial front – to some pretty depressing times.

Work has been particularly difficult this week, too. I’m not really surprised. My job sounds like it may be easy when I make random comments about it, but it takes a lot of out of you. I am a problem solver and a project manager. The problem solving is what takes up most of my time since the projects I work are usually months’ long affairs that don’t necessarily need my attention every day. Since we work repair situations for every single one of our clients – a unique service that only our telecommunications consulting company offers – it can get pretty crazy with the amount of repairs each one of us has going at any particular moment. I’ve been shunting most of my repairs to our newest team member who is… not cut out for this position. She’s getting it, but only after eight weeks of constant training and monitoring. We also suffer from severe personality conflicts and since I’m the one who has had to spend the most time with her during training, this is also pretty fucking draining. What makes it worse is that I have told my supervisor under no uncertain terms that she is not cut out for this job in any capacity and I keep getting overruled. When I brought this up to the other supervisor on staff – twice – I was given push back. I’ve stopped voice my opinions.

The worst part is that a lot of these repair situations should be fairly easy and they are. However, since I am having this new person do them all while I work on higher level project work and billing issues, I constantly have to take time out of my day to explain to her, again and again, why we do the things we do the way that we do them. She tells me that it’s “not logical” and that we have to “follow the truth.” Well, just because I know what the problem is – and nine times out of ten, when a repair comes in and I get a specific response from the site, I can tell you what the issue is – that doesn’t mean that she can’t follow the trail that we have to follow. She thinks that she understands how to do the job, but it’s a lot harder than what she thinks it is. We have to work within the framework that the carriers provide for us, which is usually convoluted and asinine. (I’m pretty sure the telephone carriers do this on purpose so that people won’t complain about issues with their phone lines or file billing disputes… thus why we all have jobs.) She is constantly coming back to me after I make her do something that she thinks is “stupid or ridiculous” and says that I’m right about X, Y, and Z. I know I’m correct. I’ve been working here for nearly a year now and I do know what I’m talking about.

I stopped complaining about her or the arguments she gives me. It’s like my voice isn’t being heard, so why bother?

No wonder why I often want to cry [while there].

My astral life has been very difficult this week, as well. To anyone who has been talking to me about this or has read my last two astral posts here, then you know I’ve been “white room’d.” I haven’t been able to leave the room since the 27^th of October and it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to leave any time soon. This really wouldn’t be so bad except that the astral self that I am is very active and is always journeying. Literally, I do not stay in any particular place for more than a few hours. I do not make relationships with anyone or anything outside of the gods and spirits I have relationships with in this realm. I am a wonderer in the likes of which amazes me because, in this place I am very much the introvert. (Sometimes, I wonder if the personality types of our astral selves speak to the bits of ourselves, in this realm, that we wish we were like and can’t bring ourselves to be.) While I’m not alone in this white room, it’s been filled with a lot of hard truths and aching pronouncements from a certain lwa in my life.

I don’t mind that he’s able to explain things to me – and not lie about it – but it’s incredibly difficult to cage up a wild animal. Honestly, I’m not sure if it’s so terrible because they’ve all conspired to cage the wild animal that I can be in that life or if it’s because, as a caged animal, I have to listen to all the horrors that I’ve been ignoring. The white room isn’t just about what’s going on over there and the integral health issues that I’ve been ignoring over there, but it’s also very much about who I am and what I’m doing over here. The bits I may not necessarily discuss, and I admit to not discussing much with anyone about this, are very painful. They aren’t quite a reliving of the traumas I’ve faced in this life as that will come later, but they are very painful anyway. Papa Legba is very much no holds barred here, but he’s kind enough to let me have the breaks I need in between each terrible truth to recover. I honestly don’t think any of the netjeru I have relationships with, even Sekhmet, would be nearly as kind about it. No, scratch that. I know that they wouldn’t. And that’s caused problems in and of themselves…

The white room is a terrible place for the animal that I am. In the few brief moments I give myself to think about this situation, I tend to envision a tiger in a very small cage, pacing back and forth and being unable to go anywhere. The cage for that tiger is the metaphor for the white room and of course, I am like the tiger. It feels very much like that. I have a difficulty with small and enclosed places, which can translate over into having hard times in large crowds. There are nights where I will wake up from doing something in that white room with a panic attack because I’ve been in that room for so long. It’s also difficult to explain how things over there can and will translate over here, but they do. The panic attacks at being stuck in a tiny place, even though it’s not really a tiny place, is enough to make me want out that much more.

But I’m at a staging point with the progress. I want to get on the next ship and do the next leg of our journey, but the rest of my soul isn’t ready yet.

And so, I wait.

And I cry.

And I whine.

And Papa Legba just lets me.

While everything is difficult, I find it harder and harder to term to the netjeru here. I’ve asked for time off from them, so this prohibits me from going to them with my anguish. I’m one of those assholes who will get what they want, realize it may not exactly be what they wanted, and then continue going with what I had asked for just out of sheer stubbornness. But, with each week since I’ve asked for that quiet time, the lwa grow louder. This is partially because the gods are missing, of course, but also because it is their time right now. My religion is very much two fold – in the spring and summer, it is the netjeru; in the fall and winter, it is the lwa. This has always been the case. But even during the winter of last year, when things were pretty fucking bad and I was growing desperate because my unemployment was getting ready to lapse, I could still pray to them and ask them for help. With each new conversation with Papa Legba, about the nature of souls and the nature of Bondye and the nature of voodoo and the nature of my faith, I’ve become more and more disenfranchised with my gods.

I find myself incredibly torn.

I disgust myself.

One of the things I never considered when I started walking down the road Papa Legba opened up for my two-plus years ago was how difficult it could or would make my relationships with the gods. I’ve gone from being a simple devotee with a myriad of relationships to several of the netjeru (and occasional other gods who straggle on by for a bit) to being a full-fledged sévité of the lwa. Well, full-fledged to some of them, anyway, and only depending on when they feel like answering that particular question. Suffice to say, my beliefs have changed just in the two years. I don’t doubt the gods. I don’t doubt that they are real. I don’t doubt that I have relationships with them and will, again, when they come back in the spring/summer. However, I find myself having a very difficult time with them because of how completely awesome Papa Legba is. He tells me the truth – there isn’t any subterfuge. He will answer my questions, within reason – without telling me something like “it’s for your own good.” (Though he does use this phrase, it’s usually at the tail end of explaining why something is happening.) Since he is so willing to hold my hand as I come back and back again to this great crossroads that is life, I find it harder and harder to continue my blind faith.

I disgust myself.

I am disenfranchised with my gods because they are not what I was always hoping for.

They’ve shown what they are, their true colors, and it makes me sad and angry.

I know that they are doing what they are doing for “good reason” but it doesn’t make anything any easier. I often ask Papa Legba why there is so much suffering going on in my life and the lives of my friends and the lives of everyone across the world. He always gets a sad look on his face and tells me that is what was created along with everything else, but that even the suffering can be a beautiful thing because it teaches us how to be strong in the face of adversity. These words make sense to me on a fundamental level, whether as an astral being or as a human being. However, what aggravates me beyond belief about this is that I’ve asked these questions of the netjeru time and time again, but never gotten so poetic a response. I’ve usually received something incredibly vague like, “it just is.” Well, why the fuck does it have to be that way? Sometimes, after responses like that from my gods, I would begin to think that maybe the Christians didn’t have it right and that we were being punished by some omniscient, omnipotent deity because someone fucked up once. It’s the way of the world to punish everyone for someone’s fuck up, so it stands to reason. However, I know that my gods are as real as die-hard Christians know that their deity is real.

Color me confused, but that’s an entry for another day.

All of this has culminated to a point where I find myself incredibly angry with everything.

One of the things about myself that I find interesting is that when I am really, really, really sad about everything is that I get angry. It’s almost as if the very idea of being sad about something just pisses me the hell off and I end up turning it into some extreme anger. This usually will come out in unintended (or possibly intended) ways like ranting about people, things, places, screaming in my car, listening to loud music, being spiteful, etc. I can’t say that any of this is a healthy reaction to sadness, but I can at least admit that this is a fucking issue.

On Saturday, I did a lave tet for myself, but not relating to any of this. I don’t doubt that everything that’s been going on this week is a part of that, and if I actually write that entry, I will explain why. (Note to self: maybe I should write that entry one day.) But considering what I did for the lave tet and the goal I had in mind when I created the wash, I have to admit that this really, really wasn’t what I was expecting. In a weak moment, I reached out to someone who was doing oracle services for free on Tumblr last night. And she… well, the oracle was pretty much spot on. I was told that I need to take care of myself because I just don’t. And this week has culminated in an ongoing feeling that I keep putting off everything that I need to do, with my shadow work and the astral stuff and my mundane life, for myself. I always have a really good reason why caring for myself isn’t nearly as important as caring about everything going on in the world.

But while suffering may be beautiful because it teaches us how to be strong, I’m not really learning how to be strong. All I’m learning is about how angry I can get because shit really fucking sucks.

Last night, I realized that I’m important. I haven’t really internalized this lesson, at all yet. But I’m hopeful that I can internalize it in the upcoming weeks as I begin to explore just how important I am, as a human being, as a devotee of the gods whom I’m angry with, as a servant of the lwa who bring my peace, but also and most importantly, as a fucking human being. I put off everything for everybody, which may not always be obvious in my actions or my comments, but it really fucking is the case. And as someone really fucking special to me – my little bit – reminded me that I am important. And as her words passed across the screen on my tablet, I realized that she was right and that the oracular session was quite right. I need to take care of myself. I need to stop caring about all of the stuff that’s going on and just come to grips with the fact that I am suffering and that shit is hard. I need to figure out how I am important in all of this and how best to get through it.

And I haven’t been able to, focusing on everybody else but me.

So, fuck it.

Changes are happening. Changes for the better, I hope. But I’m not going to sit around and play Fix It Felix for everybody. I’m too important for that. And I’m tired of letting pieces of myself go while I worry, rant, or doing magical workings for other people.

I hope this sounds selfish, I really do.

‘Cause, you know, I need to be so that I don’t burn out and destroy myself. That kind of goes against everything I’ve been going through and dealing with this week, this month, this year, these last few years. And I’d like to learn the fucking lesson, for fuck’s sake. I’d like to be able to look up one day and see that the suffering and hardships are in the past. I want to be comfortable, both in my skin and in my life. I want to be able to look at a sad patch in my life and say, “Well, this really sucks, but it was worse and I managed to get through that.” I want to learn the motherfucking lesson. And the lesson here is that I need to be a selfish twat for a while.

Sorry, but…

No fucks given.

Ansanm (SVP).

Together.

Last night, I found myself in Papa Legba’s company. I’m not quite sure what prompted this. I haven’t really reached out to him recently. It’s not that I don’t remember that he is there and willing to assist me or that I don’t care. It’s just a simple matter of not having a lot of spoons right now and being unable to do much more than go through the motions.

Perhaps he sensed my inability to do lately.

I wanted to say that we went to a ceremony, but I’m not even sure what kind. I wasn’t there at the beginning. He came to me and said, “Come, child, we are going out.” And I left my body behind to follow him to wherever it was we needed to go. We ended up in a very crowded room with undulating bodies everywhere. Men and women were already rapidly entering the throes of trance as we came onto the scene. “Get ready.” And then he was gone.

I remember standing in front of a man. His brow was sweaty and his eyes were rolling back into his skull. His body was trembling with the force of whatever was happening to him. I cannot even begin to convey what could have been happening to him. I have never been to one of these ceremonies and Hollywood renditions are really sub-par. All I know is that I could sense that a lwa would be entering him soon, though not the one who had brought me out to celebrate. It was like I could almost begin to see it happen as he shook, his face right in front of mine, but whatever shape that thing would take was beyond me.

Whatever happened next is completely lost – I blacked out after that.

I woke up feeling like I was sub-human and beneath the lwa. I get this way a lot. I have been battling depression since I was a teenager and some days are easier than others. Due to other items in my life that are… difficult and painful, I have had a lot of depressive days lately. I’ve found myself feeling like I am not a good servant more and more often. While I know that this is not the case since they still come to me, they still tell me, they still direct me, I still feel like I suck at it all. I’m sure this will pass at some point or another. In the mean time, I just have to deal with whatever feelings I have going on inside of me.

When I woke up this morning, I wondered why Papa Legba would take me out. We haven’t had a night out together in a long time. It’s not that I’m not interested in going because I am. It’s just a fact that I am not his only servant and I am not the only one who needs him. So, I stay in the background and I go through the motions and I speak the words and I cry out in pain and I wait, patiently, for him to turn his eyes on me again.

On my drive to work, I tried to figure out what it could all mean. I’m a big believer in the fact that when a deity or one of the lwa pop up in a dream, then I need to pay attention. Hell, maybe this wasn’t even a dream but reality. Maybe I really did witness someone else’s celebration. Sometimes, I can catch glimpses of a round, older woman talking to me in the back of my head so again, maybe I really did end up somewhere else. Whatever this instance really happened to be, I don’t know. All I do know is that I couldn’t figure out what the hell this was supposed to mean for me.

While I was mulling this over in my mind, trying to feel better about everything, my thoughts turned to the Marassa. My offerings and my weekly rites have not been successful. I’ve begun to believe that they are gone. I’ll clear off their altar space and move it elsewhere just in case I may be wrong. But the loss of the twinned lwa who made me laugh as they played with my son’s loud cars or would crash over blocks or played hide-and-go-seek is kind of wounding. It makes me feel like, inevitably, everything and everyone leaves and I just have to deal with it.

I know my thoughts shouldn’t be selfish on this one. It’s their prerogative what they decide to do. If they are to stay or they are to go, then that is their choice. I am just here to serve them while they’re around for a while. But it still sucks when you think you know what you’re supposed to do – build a foundation – and then you get tossed aside.

I thought about the jaunt while I felt really badly about the Marassa and I began to wonder…

Maybe it’s the jaunt, itself, that is the lesson and not what I saw.

Thinking on it in that context, I have to admit that I did feel a little less like I was a horrible servant. If I can just assume – and really, I can’t because it’s the lwa and they are not always so easily figured out – that he was simply there so that the two of us could spend some time together, then it doesn’t feel so strange or so weird. It doesn’t feel like I was given a perfect, beautiful gift for being an awful child or like I was given the best experience of my life after having just killed someone’s kitten. It feels more, in this way, that he was giving me something special and precious to hold on to and remember when things are rough. He was saying, in his own Papa Legba way, that things are really awful right now, but here is a moment where we can just spend time together.

In that context, really, it was wonderful.

Atoure (SVP).

To surround.

Papa Legba by Larissa Clause.

Much of the time, when I am directed to learning something by Vye Legba, I am given a rather oblique and general communication on the subject. Point in case, he wanted me to do some research relating to my previous post and adding celebrations to my religious calendar. His exact wording for what he required of me on this search? “Pick up the book and read what you need.” There really wasn’t a lot to go on when it came to this. I had to decide which book he may be talking about and hope that I was correct. The first book I chose was wrong. Since I had no compulsion to open it until two days after I decided to utilize it for the research necessary, I rather figured it would be a failure on my part. And it was, but I still had to double and triple check that intuitive knowing that I had chosen incorrectly. I stared at my bookcase, thinking long and hard about his instruction before thinking of what I needed and what books I hadn’t read as thoroughly. Maybe he was talking about something I haven’t delved into as heartily as I have with some of my other voodoo books? It would make sense that whatever he wanted me to learn would be in a place I haven’t found it yet, hm? So, I grabbed Serving the Spirits: The Religion of Haitian Vodou by Mambo Vye Zo Komande LaMenfo. And on my second attempt, I found what I was looking for.

The thing is that I’m pretty sure he wanted me to pick up this book for numerous reasons. It wasn’t just the research he’s asking me to look into relating to calendar related items, but also because there were other items I needed to read and learn. And this book really helped me with that in a way that I wasn’t expecting. This particular epiphany related to the Guédé, of all nachon to be epiphany-ing about. And was thoroughly unexpected. (Yet more proof, to me, that Papa Legba is the string puller in the background.) The other thing relating to this book is that a lot of the items she mentioned when discussing the nachon of the Guédé was not something I had heard before and was not something the Bawon found particularly pleasing, either.

While I have done as much research as my little typing fingers can convey and as much reading as my thirty-year-old eyeballs allow, there have been a lot of items that have slipped through the cracks. A large part of this isn’t just my own human frailty but also the fact that there are just going to be things that I am simply incapable of learning because I have not been inducted into a society. I have, mostly, made amends with the fact that the information I have is going to be anthropological in nature – so couched in the terminology of a lot of theories and possibilities – or based on a single person’s practice. While anthropological tomes are pretty damn important to the Kemetic part of things, a lot of my practice with the lwa can be simply stated as “UPG.” I may not know what it is that I am doing, or the specific why of the matter. Sometimes, later, I find out that there is actually a word for what it is I am doing or that there is a specific action that is relating to what it is I have already been doing to serve my spirits. But, for the most part, I’m being pushed and prodded in a way that is completely outside of a standardized frame of reference, or so I believe. While this is, obviously, a problem in numerous arenas – I mean, really, can you imagine talking to a practitioner about some of the shit you do as a non-initiate and not being laughed at because of it? It’s something that I find easier to do because of the Kemetic background that I have.

What it comes down to is that I like the structured reliability of a community to fall back on. However, because I have a functional gateway of communication between myself and the various OTHERS™ who have entered my life, I don’t necessarily require it.

This isn’t to say that whatever I end up with is the proper choice. I can only go so far with rather vague instructions – please see Papa Legba’s commentary above – before I come to a stopping point. But there are days where the fact that I can surround myself with the lwa is infinitely more preferable than having to stop and learn under the tutelage of a human being who is as fallible as myself. By surrounding myself with the lwa and by embracing their entrance into my life – as much as someone as caustic as me can anyway – I think I have it a lot easier. While I know that many established practitioners would read what I write and scoff heartily or would shake their heads or accuse me of something or other, I feel a certain type of safety in these kinds of moments. In learning based on what the lwa themselves desire and have in store for me versus the tried and true message. And as Papa Legba is so fond of telling me over and over again, “Sometimes, you just have to go and fuck up the status quo.” While I’m not quite sure what that means to Papa Legba, I can see what he means. Sometimes, the tried and true methods take a good deal longer than the lwa are willing to wait on.

Something of interest that I found in this section of the book related to how the Guédé and the honored ancestors need to be kept apart when you honor them. This really made me sit back and pay attention to something that had been niggling me in the back of my head. The thing is that when it comes to the akhu veneration that I do, I tend to consider all that I do, from the grave-tending to the minor rituals in home, as a part of that. I also tended to view what I was doing for the akhu as part and parcel with what I was doing with the Bawon and the Guédé. The statements relating to this within the book made me sit back and seriously take stock in the various aspects of my practice and how differentiated they actually are.

Baron Samedi by Veronika Unger.

When I am grave-tending, this is in honor of the Bawon, Maman, and Papa G. I am not doing this for myself. This is how I offer them service each week. This is also why much of what I do when I am in a graveyard stems from bits and pieces I’ve put together in my readings relating to the Guédé. All of the offerings, everything I say, and how I go about what it is I do in those cemeteries is a carefully created Guédé-related blanket that I have sewn together based off of my readings and based off of things that the Guédé have asked of me. When I enter the graveyard, I announce myself, which is something that Bawon requested that I do. When I enter a graveyard, I pay my way with pennies at the sentinel grave nearest the entrance, which is something that I learned from another Vodouisant. The offerings that I leave are based entirely off of things that the Guédé have asked of me or based off of things I’ve picked up here and there in either blogs or books. Every aspect to what I do when I go to the cemetery to honor the locals here is one-hundred percent something relating to the Guédé. This is why I have had a difficult time trying to mesh my Kemetic practice into the grave-tending because, damn it, there is nothing Kemetic about it outside of the occasional cone of incense or the fucking flowers I leave.

And that’s it.

This made me realize that my constant failed attempts at blending the akhu veneration with the service for the Guédé is never going to work. I had a feeling that was the case because, well, every time I go to the cemetery and try to stay in a Kemetic frameset, Bawon comes on over and chews me the hell out over how silly I’m being. I was doing him a sever disservice and doing myself one as well by attempting to blend the two. They have no requirement to be blended. The work I do for the Guédé, the forgotten ones in those cemeteries, has to do with Bawon, Maman, and Papa G. They are not my akhu in the way that this book made me realize: they’re not my fucking relatives so I need to stop inviting them over when I’m doing the Kemetic akhu thing, damn it, because as special as they are to me, their being special has nothing to do with my Kemeticism. That special has to do with the voodoo portion of what it is I do.

Why it has taken me this long to realize this is incredibly stupid and silly and ridiculous. All I can say is that I am a stubborn son of a bitch.

Another item that was of particular interest to me was about how the Guédé and the rest of your lwa need to be kept apart. I do understand this, actually. I know how the rest of the lwa tend to feel about the Guédé. I’ve read enough to know that most of the lwa will leave a Fet if the Guédé show up, unannounced. There are different reasons for it – in this book, there was mention about how Freda will leave when they show up because the Guédé are incredibly tactless and truthful. I understand this, of course, but I have to admit that my Guédé altar is right in the center of my altars for the Marassa and Papa Legba. And of course, wasn’t it interesting that Bawon was a lot less lively around me after I had placed him up there…?

I thought about this a lot. There are some issues that I have relating to the “you have to” in this stuff. A part of it is the fact that a lot of us non-initiated don’t have a lot of time, energy, or space to have the types of altars that the Guédé may want. I know exactly what Bawon wants and I know exactly what he would like on it. I’ve seen it. He’s shown me exactly what he’s hoping to have, one day, in my home. In the interim, what he is looking for is going to have to wait due to a serious lack of space. I live in a very tiny apartment. Every available wall space has been taken up with things like furniture and altars and living space. What bits I have been able to appropriate as functional altars (such as my Anup and akhu altar that sidelines as a filled DVD case) are very small and not very functional. I had to go from a full sized apartment and all of the furniture that furnished that place into a place that is half its size. For fuck’s sake, the living room is 10×14 nook off of the dining area. So, while I understand that the lwa don’t like the Guédé and don’t want them around, there are some things that just have to give.

And that means the Guédé end up smack dab in the middle of two other lwa.

While thinking about how I hadn’t heard anything from the Bawon since I made the decision to add the Guédé to the other lwa‘s home, I felt a brush on my shoulder. It wasn’t really like… it wasn’t like someone was stroking my shoulder to tell me I was doing all right. But it wasn’t exactly not like that either. It was almost a way of saying, “There’s other stuff going on right now and I’m not angry about it and if anyone else is, they can take it up with me so don’t worry about it.” It was soothing, more than anything else, and it helped.

Again, I know that what I’m doing is probably wrong in a lot of other established practitioners’ eyes. However, I have to make do with what I got. And if that means that I’m going to have to put the services I wish to have for some other lwa, most notably the Marassa and Gran Bwa, on hold until things can be maneuvered around properly, and then that’s what I’m going to have to do. It’s not very much like I asked for them to come to me, anyway. They showed up to me, for whatever reason, and I kind of have to believe that means something to both them and to the services I am intending on implementing for each.

I think what really threw me for a loop was this quote, “I was taught that unless you have The Baron in your constellation or were born on his day (November 2) then you do not serve Him. He is too dangerous to anyone He has not chosen for himself. Even those of us who do serve him, must pay the price in the end of that service.” While I agree that nothing is given for free and that we must all, ultimately, pay the price set for us when it comes to the services we offer to the lwa and the Guédé, I’m not quite sure why people should not offer the Baron services. She hints that he is a dark and sinister figure. And while I agree he has his moments, nothing I have found anywhere has ever intimated that he should be left alone. Obviously, each Mambo and Houngan is taught in a different way from one another, which is why there is no unified “this is how it is” in voodoo. But, this statement bothered me a lot.

Yet another downfall of being an uninitiated prat? I have no one to turn to when it comes to this shit.

This was a problem up until I fell asleep when I went to see the Bawon. (Side note: whenever I dream of the lwa, they are in a forest. I know what forest, specifically, they are inhabiting, but I always find it weird that I am, without fail, in a forest and surrounded by forest noises.) He was holding reign over his Guédé and smoking a cigar. And he was quite angry with the much of the items I had taken away from that chapter. At one point, he slashed his hand in a rather sinister manner and said around his cigar, “Don’t you be worrying, baby girl. You do what I tell you to do. That’s what you worry about.” I have to say that I have never seen the Bawon as angry before (and as I told Tumblr this morning, I do not recommend seeing him angry). But he was pretty pissed off with a lot of the ideas and thoughts I was having because of this.

The lesson here (remember there was one) is that just because I find something of note or interest in a book doesn’t mean that the lwa and Guédé whom I offer my services to are going to be pleased with what I pick up. Remember that rambling monologue earlier on about how I get a lot of direction from the lwa and the Guédé because I have a functional godphone? That’s the lesson. The lesson isn’t just that I may find things that the spirits I service disagree with. The lesson is that I’ve spent so much time relying on books, blogs, and other people to tell me what to do here. When all along, I’ve been doing a damn good thing by listening to the lwa and what they’ve wanted of me.

This hearkens back to a conversation I had with Papa Legba recently about Gran Bwa. I’m going to leave off with it here.

Papa Legba You need to honor Gran Bwa. He come to you and you don’t do nothin’ for him.
Me I failed the test he gave me, remember? I figured we were just kind of done. Besides, how the hell do I honor him?
Papa Legba Haven’t you been doin’ that all ready?
Me What? No. I’ve been honoring the land spirit and leaving– Wait.
Papa Legba You been doin’ this whole damn time and you don’t e’en remember what started all that.
Me Oh, fuck.