This is rapidly becoming unacceptable.

Aug 28, 2007
I have got to find a way to make work and the Craft compatible. At six o'clock in the morning, a formal full moon ritual sounds like the best idea in the world. At six o'clock in the evening, I can barely summon the energy to order pizza online. (I should have known that the day I have officially designated as "takeout day," due to it being the end of a work-week for me, is not really ideal for ritual...)

This morning, though, was astonishingly wonderful. As I walked from the kitchen into the dining room, packing my lunch for work, I smelled roses for no reason at all. I wasn't wearing any floral perfume, I hadn't bought flowers in weeks, and besides, we're well past rose season...until finally I spotted the bouquet of dried roses that has been sitting on the ledge there for, oh, nearly a year now.

I can't recall ever having smelled them before. They were my grandmother's funeral roses from last Samhain; yellow roses were her favorite flower, although I can't recall her ever having any (she didn't have the patience to grow roses, and she was far too practical to buy them for herself), and the casket and church were covered with them. My cousin had rose petal beads made of the casket flowers, and the rest of us all took a bouquet home.

It was a strange sort of reminder to have that early in the morning, on a beautiful morning like this, one of the first without rain in weeks, still cool from the evening but with the promise of heat to come. It is still painful to think of my grandmother. I can't help but feel that I neglected her in the last few years, so desperate was I to find a life for myself apart from my family. But it's hard to be depressed for long about yellow roses, and I found myself thinking of all the time I had spent with her -- plenty, really, she lived ten blocks from my house and I practically lived there when I was a kid. Our birthdays were around the same time, and we had huge family summer birthday parties for all of us. All the parade routes went right by her house, so we watched them from her bedroom balcony. And whenever there was family from out of town, it wasn't long before we were all there, causing no end of chaos to Grandma's usually tidy home (and her the happiest of anyone about it).

I felt like my eyes were open in a way they hadn't been in quite a long time, this morning; it lasted almost until lunch. On the way from the bus stop to the office, I saw two ravens picking through some litter in the parking lot. There used to be quite a flock of them around there, but I hadn't seen any all summer; I had been wondering where they'd got to.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe you are being too formal/structured in your devotions. I am pagan,not wiccan. I have an altar to Tellus Mater-each morning I leave a small food offering on the altar. I light incense & recite 3 short prayers & add any requests I have. For the Full Moon,etc.,I just go outside w/a glass of wine and praise the Moon for her beauty & mystery.

Jen Moore said...

anon, I'd say you have a very good point, if not for the fact that I have not done anything in, oh, far too long, and my definition of formal currently involves casting a circle, and that's about it. :) I thought I was up for that of an evening; I guess not. It's a little disappointing, but now I know, and can plan better for when I feel like I need to do that. Your daily devotion sounds like exactly what I have been trying to do; reconstructing my altar is a major step in reminding me to pay more attention in my everyday life.

In point of fact, the plan always was to work on my new altar table today. I'm quite sure I can manage to do that and stop kicking myself over things I can't do anything about anyway. (This fairly incoherent sentence brought to you by "before morning coffee...")