May 3, 2015.
One of the things that we need to take into consideration when we start celebrating holidays, besides what in the world the holiday is about, is also how much energy and intent you can put into the holiday. I have many holidays that pop up little notifications on my Google calendar, but I only celebrate about 10% of those holidays. I have more willingness and gusto to celebrate holidays associated with Sekhmet, of course, because that is part of our pact regarding our relationship. But there are often many celebrations that I would like to take part in or at least attempt to figure out what they could be about but due to spoon shortages, I end up watching them float by.
As anyone knows after reading my last post, I am currently going through a serious dearth of spoons. I am very lucky if I can get up the energy to get up in the morning and even more lucky if I do not fall asleep before 8PM. It has been a constant struggle for months to keep myself awake long enough to eat dinner, never mind the idea of researching and/or celebrating holidays. Weekend holidays are easier, of course, because I have less stress and more time. However less stress and more time doesn’t necessarily equate to more spoons – it just means that I can think longer and harder about whether or not I have the wherewithal to celebrate something.
I will be honest – I have had a severe push to observe (for the first time) the Feast of the Beautiful Reunion. Since that is going to be a two week long production (maybe), I have been saving my spoons. But I saw this holiday pop up on my calendar a few days ago and realized that I should probably do the thing. If nothing else, I could at least ponder what it could possibly mean to me.
The issue with this holiday is that, like Sekhmet’s Procession with her Executioners, I didn’t know who the executioners were supposed to symbolize. As with that holiday which I first celebrated last year, I had to think long and hard regarding who was going to do some processing. Last year, I thought about it from a number of different angles and ended up just assuming that it was a catch-all term that could represent followers of hers, the netjeri that do her bidding, the Seven Arrows, and possibly priests from antiquity.
I decided that, this time around, I was going to make it about me. As I said in my 2014 post about that holiday:
I tend to think of myself, and the other Sekhmet devotees, as executioners. In many instances, we turn to her out of a deep-seated need for removing harmful influences in our lives. … And what I’ve come back to is that she has always, always helped me out with “executing” the more negative aspects of myself, my practice, and my past. In every instance, whether she has been publicly and obviously assisting me with it or she has been maneuvering in the background, she has assisted me with this in one way or another.
Not to mention that self-care is important. I don’t make it a top tier priority, though I recognize that I should. The thing that caught up to me though was that there are plenty of national and secular holidays that are celebrated and there are numerous people throughout the country who use those holidays with the idea that they were going to relax. Well… why not this particular holiday for me, as a child of Sekhmet, as an executioner of Sekhmet?
I took it in turns.
I smited some isfet by putting all of the paperwork away. One may not think that official paperwork should or could be equated with isfet but it is in my household. I let the paperwork sit for a good few weeks on the table before I have the stamina to go through it. If I go through it too quickly, I have a panic attack and my anxiety starts acting up. So by putting that paperwork away, I was concluding that the important bits had been addressed and that everything else could be filed away for burningfuture reference.
I then sat for a very long time engrossed in my recent binge watching of Lost.
I execrated the hell out of the dust in the living room, the crumbs on my son’s floor, the weekly detritus on the kitchen table. The SO helped out by smiting the fuck out of the dirty dishes and then execrating the grocery shopping list. I finished it all with a rousing bitch slap to the dirty laundry, putting a sizable dent in the pile.
When you couch your usual weekly chores in terms like that, it almost sounds like you’re really making a difference, you know? I mean, I don’t know if equating the dust and laundry to something execratable would really work for someone else, but by putting myself in that mindset, I was more likely to want to find the spoons in order to achieve the goal. It was like by telling myself that this was for the good of the totality of all of creation, then it meant more than just me being a lazy sack of spoonless shit who couldn’t get up long enough to put a dirty bowl in the sink. (For reference, I do actually put the dirty bowls in the sink. In fact, there are many days where I’m almost positive that I am the only one in this house who can do that, but you get the point.)
We bleed stars onto the world
And weep flames upon the universe
I spent the few days leading up to this holiday wondering what I was going to do in order to celebrate it. I spend a lot of days, actually, when it comes to my holidays attempting to determine what the best course of action will be. I will admit that I never actually know until the day is upon me, though I do tend to have some ideas.
I don’t know if I did this recreated holiday any justice, but I can say that it was relaxing.
Mystical Bewilderment 