An Answer from The Ibis

I was expecting to be greeted by Set….possibly by an angry Set. I was up pacing (again) at 2am (again) going over the RPD dilemma (again).

 My mind simply wouldn’t shut down. I was not myself tonight at the reunion. I don’t know myself. I don’t have confidence that I am right about anything anymore. Okay, I said to Set, just once more, I can accept the results even if it’s not you, but what if it’s someone who really doesn’t fit? I don’t know what’s right, but surely my sense of what’s wrong hasn’t failed me…

 I went to the shrine room because I wanted to get some kind of *thwack* and get told to stop worrying about it and go to bed. But I didn’t. Set wasn’t there. The room was quiet and peaceful and…

The Silent One. The Ibis.

Knowledge is power and peace. He told me. Go look up the Names you think you can’t relate to. See if they are really as unknowable as you believe. 

Turns out most of them aren’t. Name after name went on my list of Names I could accept. Bits and pieces and connections… I followed his brilliant suggestion and looked at each name as if I had just been divined as that Name’s daughter. I found ever more disparate parts of myself that could recognize them. How can I know myself if myself is so malleable? If I cannot guess the correct answer, does that mean that for all my effort I know nothing of my soul? Horizons within me opened and I saw something I hadn’t seen before, learned something that seemed impossible to learn. I felt something solid in my mind shift and then dissolve.  How could there be so much that was hidden from me? How could I have missed all of this? What does it mean that this is here within me? Did I fail in all I have done to know myself?

No. It means you are greater than you think. You can contain multitudes.

Quoting Walt Whitman? I suppose I can see it: if we are all chips of creation and if every piece of creation contains an image of the whole, than anything is possible and the fact that it is unknowable, that we might be inherently unknowable even to ourselves, that there may be hidden depths even though we scoured the landscape of ourselves for lifetimes…it is naught but a beautiful mystery.

 Which I can accept.

Still, there were two names, only two, but…

I could not make them fit in me. Taweret. Bes. Protectors of pregnant women and children and the home. The everyday Netjer. The ones most present in Ancient Egyptian lives and seemingly least present in mine. I have no partner and no child. I have no connection to that warm and happy home they symbolize. I have no hope for that common, comfortable life.

So what would it mean to you if they were named?

It would mean soul searching, I guess—perhaps a sign to walk away…Or would it? Maybe it would be something I dare not even think on. Permission. I have always sensed that I was meant to accomplish something. I have always felt that if love or child were a hindrance to that that they were not mine to have—that I would be kept from that. What would those names be to me? Permission to have a common life. Permission to settle down and want nothing more from the world than what my ancestors were satisfied with.

You do not feel that you have this permission?

Maybe not. Maybe that’s why their names bother me instinctively. Maybe that’s why I feel so strongly that they could not be the ones who made me…But that’s silly. The RPD is not about permission. The forces that created my soul are not about permission. It’s about where this flicker of life which resides in me first found its lighting. Am I really so convinced that I am not of that? What if I am? Would that be so terrible? I suppose it wouldn’t be.

 I suppose I they are in me too, then. All of the Netjeru are reflected in me in one way or another.

That is why you must ask.

Hence the divination. I see. So that’s the reason for it? I’m human, so I can’t possible know. I can’t possible know which of the myriad remnants of creation within me are the work of my parents. I can guess, based on which strands seem the strongest, but I’ll never really know if I only guess. I’ll never know if those feelings are strong because certain Names choose to walk with me, because they are thick strands in the weft, or if they are strong because I have found the center threads, the warp of the loom.

If I want to know for sure, I have to ask. And I have to ask someone who can answer without bias. Someone I trust implicitly to cast the divination without any concern for its outcome.

The room is quiet and I’m done for tonight. It has been a long day and there is peace enough now for me to rest.