Daily Practice

listening --
I drew the Seven of Swords the other day. (I keep meaning to draw a card every day, but I don't always make it. Of course, when I leave it sit for a few days, sometimes I find that it means more by the time I get around to properly doing an interpretation.) I read it first as "getting away with something," but although that was the interpretation that stuck in my head, I didn't know quite what it meant. Today, while I was sitting in the library working on some homework, the card popped into my mind again and I looked it up. One of the interpretations was "lone wolf." I thought about how disappointed I was that my roommate has all but lost her job because it means that I don't have any time in the apartment by myself any more, and I knew what the card meant.

light --
The light coming in through the dining room window when I was making lunch was so vivid today. It looked like the light you get in the summer, at around 10:00 in the morning when I've just come back from the huge farmer's market downtown, hot and bright and molten, almost like something living. It's the only kind of light that makes my kitchen look big. It isn't spring yet in Wisconsin, but the light is back.

expression --
I wrote a poem during Imbolg, when I kept Brigid's flame lit for two nights and a day. (I wrote two poems, but one of them is terrible and I don't know how to fix it.) It's too much about me right now, so I keep poking at it, to make it about something else. It's also about the light in the dining room window, and food fresh from the farmer's market, and spring after a long winter. But there's also a person at the middle of it, and I don't quite know who she is just yet. I haven't figured out quite how to be quiet and let her speak through me.

offering --
I don't give up very much, it's true. Sometimes I think of May Morrison saying, "You will never understand the true nature of sacrifice." (Don't worry, I have no intention of murdering local policemen in the name of it.) Besides, the lakes are too frozen to drop anything into them right now, and clogging up the locks with gold jewelry is probably a bad idea. I share a lot, though. A view of the barren treetops with the full moon, a fresh snowfall with the frozen earth, a warm patch of sunlight with a lush green houseplant. And I say hello to everything I pass, and I speak to the gods as though they're always listening, even though they're probably not. Perhaps in some ways my attention is enough.

Happy Imbolg

For an Imbolg present to me from the Universe, I got over my cold. Yay!

For an Imbolg present from the Internet to you, through me, I'd like to link you to one of my favorite new poems. I'd hate to repost it here, as it was a personal gift, but you can read it here, deep in the discussion threads of Making Light (which is a regular source of excellent poetry).