Wep Ronpet 2012

So the new year begins.

The celebration early this morning went as well as I had hoped it might and sharing it with a close friend was extra special. I was on a spiritual high after all the celebrating this week and even though I was tired, it took a long time for me to calm down enough afterwards to go to sleep. I slept most of the day—catching up after a lot of self-imposed long nights—and then went out to dinner with friends to finish off the celebration properly.

And then…

Well, that’s where I am now. Slept too much to be tired just yet and it’s late enough that I’m the only one up at this hour. Left to contemplate the year passed and the year dawning. It’s only now that I realize how much work is before me.

So much changed at the end of this year that I can scarcely comprehend how different my world has really become. For six years, everything has been about my mother. Now, suddenly, it’s all about me again. I face the same frightening openness of that first year after college—the year when my deep-breath-leap-of-faith jump into life was interrupted and truncated by my mother’s diagnosis. Only now I’m six years older and wiser, and looking at the world from a completely different perspective.  Though, apparently, I’m no less afraid of seizing my own destiny than I was facing this decision six years ago. So I’m left with the question:

Now that my path is not dictated by my mother’s illness—what do I do with my life? What do I want to do with it? What are my goals? My plans? What hopes and dreams do I have now that I’m finally allowed to have them? Now that I can finally dream big without having to worry who my failures might hurt? Now that I am the only one riding on my own decisions?

Ten years ago, when I first converted to paganism, long before I was Kemetic, I had a vision. I followed a flickering, unseen image of a wolf into a remote open field at the end of a harsh winter and looked up into the sky at his direction. I saw the milky way—my whole galaxy—spill in a line across the heavens. I remember how small and insignificant I felt, and at the same time how hopeful and excited I was by the prospect of that vastness. Imagine what might be out there, imagine all the things that have the potential to be. I have been longing for that feeling. I didn’t realize it, but now I see that it’s true. I need that hope and that excitement. I need to finally make the leap of true faith and live this life before it’s too late for me to do so.

What was it that I had wanted to do? What had I hoped to find out there?

I’m not sure I remember. So that’s the first thing.

I watched the sun set on the first day of the New Year and now I am left with the task of going back, of digging deep, of searching old places and old memories, looking for that thing I had given up chasing. I think I know where I can find it, but part of me is afraid to open that place in myself. Like the vastness of the night sky, it is dark and makes me feel small and vulnerable.

And yet…

When that spectral wolf took me to the field, he also took me home again. He sat by the fire and stared at me. Watching expectantly. As if I was supposed to do something afterward. Eventually the vision faded, but the sense of having something  I was supposed to do, something I was supposed to accomplish…that never left me. I never did figure out what it was, definitively. I have some clues, some hints, given later in dreams.

Perhaps it’s time to poke at that mystery again.