Updated June 11, 2020: See end of post for further info.
June 1, 2011
Part of my morning routine is to carefully hobble through the house every day, for 10 to 20 minutes, to get my body moving and loose enough to function reasonably well. Note the term “carefully.” I cannot manage—let alone risk—careless moves first thing in the day. Without my cautious warm-up hobble, further movements will be painful, and possibly injurious.
This morning I hobbled to Faerie. (I was already there, actually, but not aware of that blessing.) I asked the Faerie Queen to guide me. She said she preferred to walk next to me. I enjoyed that.
Mind you, I am not one to suffer from the illusion that I should exchange the all-knowing guidance of a Divinity—and God’s omnipotent care—for an ego-ridden reduction of Deity to merely a friend. However, God can be both parent and friend. After all, She has all powers. I want to benefit from all of them! And, if my ego is checked, walking next to God is walking next to the Holy Friend.
I try to use my morning shuffle, and the subsequent physical-therapy work-out, as meditation (ritual, contemplation). Integrative being.
I’ve been thinking about Faerie cats the past few days. It’s not uncommon for me to muse on Fey felines. One of my favorite myths is about the cat who slept in the light bearer’s bed. (See Aradia, Gospel of Witches.) Also, I find all cats to be Fey, and haven’t been without a cat familiar by my side for decades. (See my painting of my Faerie cat. Along with the picture, I discuss my familiar—a trickster kitty—and how absurd synchronicities constantly show me the beautiful cosmic pattern of life.)
For years, I’ve been doing a dance with the white Fey feline down the road. The dance continues the past few days. (See Today’s Walk: The Forest and I are Angry, a story about the lessons that cat and a wild rabbit gave me about anger and peace.)
For some reason, when I first opened my eyes this morning, I glanced down at the floor. The aforementioned Faerie cat who lives with me was there, right below my head. She wasn’t sitting but lying down, as if she’d been comfortably waiting for a while, to surprise me with her gaze.
Her eyes are a signpost pointing to Fey lands, if those eyes are not an actual gate opening into Gaia’s mystic realms. Or sometimes she just transmits otherworldly energy to me—if I am open.
There are blessings all around me. The cat by my bed with the eyes to Faerie wants to give those blessings to me as soon as I am awake. The cat down the road wants to help me find them when I walk the road. Every atom in this room tries to both show the blessings to me as I hobble and bestow those blessings upon me. Instead of being aware of and accepting these gifts, I often unhappily scramble after happiness, hurriedly and hence injuriously hobble toward it, feeling forlorn, feeling happiness is impossible to achieve.
I pray:
Let me accept the small blessings because each is a portal into a happy and entire world.
The eyes of the cat are a doorway into wonder.
I take a single ordinary breath, and it echoes God’s breath, causing Her inhalation and exhalation to reverberate back on me till I am stardrenched.
Even each moment of my befuddled unhappy wandering is a descendant of my ancestors still dancing—my ancestors, the ancient stars. Each moment.
Each minuscule forward-movement of my crippled body or spirit is that same ancient but ever-wholly-new dance, a world unto itself.
Note re June 11, 2020 update: Liking to combine my visual art and writing, I made myself and some of my students an ornamented Book of Shadows page that has this post’s prayer, and thought it’d be nice to add the BoS page at the bottom of this post. (Then I saw it might also be nice to add a few tiny paintings to the post as accents, noticed ways to make its language clearer, and fixed a link. Typical elf. Elves are always polishing shoes, pots and pans, and their own work.)
