Her-wer's Birthday Celebration: What is seen by Two Eyes

The setting sun was pink and low in the western sky, mirrored by the waxing moon rising in the east. The colors of the prairie were soft and dusty, reminding me of the desert I once dwelled in. I could not help but imagine that the two luminous orbs above were the eyes of Her-wer as he looked through the horizons on this, the day of his birth.

Still I avoided the Senut.

The prior nights events hung with me and happenings early in the day frightened me away from them for a short time…

I was told once, by a psychologist, that if you can still ask whether or not you are crazy, you most certainly aren’t. Psychosis is in degrees—we all contain the seeds of illness for they are the tools of the consciousness and subconscious, of the mind and the soul. It is when the seeds take root and cover the landscape of one’s entire life like vicious weeds blocking out all light to the healthy growth below, then we say of it “that is craziness and must be dealt with”. The rest is merely human.

That is small comfort when one wanders so far into the unseen as to forget, temporarily, the road back to the normal world. I cannot say if what I experienced were visions or delusions, but in either case, I was fearful.
I paced the hall in the morning. Sunlight. Dawn. In fact, well passed dawn. After being up at odd hours the night before, I slept until well into the apex of the day. The light should have brought comfort and normalcy back to my home, but something lingered from the night before. It’s not his day anymore, a deeper part of me whispered into my mind, why still think on this?

I remember my grandmother’s house when I was a child and the garden we ran wild through on sunny days like this. I remember the stepping stones near the screened porch: 24x24 tiles of weathered wood, they were like driftwood made by rain, curious relics to appear in a grass ocean hundreds of miles from the sea. I remember my brother and I lifting them up to search for crawlies and salamanders in the moist black earth under them where the sun never touched. I remember the beetles—thin but bulbous at the same time, often very large. They were from His world, though I didn’t know it then.

I was in the bathroom this morning, looking for something in a cabinet when I felt it. A small niggling. A flicker of something, something that was “almost life” hiding somewhere near me. I looked down and saw a clump of fuzz tucked between the baseboard and a floor mat. I almost breathed a sigh of relief. Somewhere between my childhood and now, I lost my reverence for crawly things. My fear of insects boarders on inappropriate these days. The mere thought of them lurking in my living space sets my heart pounding and has me checking sheets and looking under couch cushions.

But my mind wouldn’t leave well enough alone. There is something under the rug, my intuition whispered. A spider? My stomach flipped. This is spider season in my local clime, when the weather becomes less amenable to the critters and they start looking for future winter quarters in old buildings like ours. Wolf spiders. Big ones. I shuddered and hoped I was wrong as I flipped up the mat to look.

Not a spider. A thin but bulbous beetle, black as ink—exploring the grout lines of the tile just as the ones from my childhood used to explore the dark dirt below the wood boards. But they don’t belong in this climate—I’m several ecosystems north of their natural habitat. What kind of omen was this?

I zapped it with a dust buster. A dead omen now.

I tried to ignore it. I tried to go back to doing normal things, but my mind wouldn’t let it alone. I went and laid down on the bed for a bit, trying to relax and remind myself that I was just being silly. They probably live in lots of climates, I thought, I’ve just never chanced to see one here before. Then I noticed sounds out in the hallway. Familiar sounds, but eerie outside their normal context. Voices coming from within the white noise of the fans. It’s a normal occurrence around here. I’m used to voices at night when I’m trying to sleep, unintelligible, half whispered. No one else hears them, but since they’ve never actually said anything to me, I’ve never seen them as a threat. But during the day? This was new.

I went out into the hall and turned off the fans.

Then, when I went back in the living room, I discovered I had a sudden and irrational fear of the lilies in the flower arrangement on my ancestor altar—there was something in the way the smell of them permeated my home, mostly unnoticed, but occasionally overly present and haunting, and something in the way the other flowers wilted even as the unopened buds of the last few lilies bloomed…I was afraid to touch them or move them but suddenly didn’t want them in my space anymore and wasn’t certain why.

“Enough!" I said, "I have had enough of the unseen.”

I know how to fix these things. Modern society gives me a plethora of ways to avoid and drown out the natural world of the spirits. Self love, pizza, and anime (in that order) is more than enough to firmly anchor in the mundane—which is what I did. (That first one may sound like an odd choice, but it makes sense: no better way to bring an idle, other-seeing mind back into the physical now than with some basic hard-wired biology) I spent the afternoon doing decidedly non-spiritual things (read: goofing around on the net and playing Nintendogs) while staunchly refusing to even consider doing Senut.

Then I had to make a short trip to the store for milk and assorted other groceries and saw that stunning sky above me. *sigh* A few hours later I was purified and standing before the shrine. But I kept the lights on. And I was upfront about my concerns, about how I was skittish of the unseen even as I reveled in it. About how I had had enough of death, even as it continued to consume my world.

But the presence that came, the Netjer I invited, here on his day outside the year…he was not a presence of death or destruction. He was calm and bright and full of life. Life. My gods it’s been so long since I felt that. And I did feel it, strongly, and I was moved to tears despite my struggle not to be—I have also had enough of crying. He didn’t say anything, but his presence enveloped me and reminded me that there is life to be had and there is life to be lived. My shrine, I learned, does not need to be filled with darkness and mystery—it works even with the lights on.

 Because even the unseen is not always a dark place.

Balance, in all things, is key. I think Her-wer is a Name who understands duality intimately. I have no sources to back that up, but I felt it in the moment and think now I understand why I am drawn to the images of him that show him with the two cosmic eyes—one solar and one lunar—grasping the shen in his claws.

It is something to aspire to. I also must learn to see with both eyes. The seen and the unseen. It is not a choice between them. It is a struggle to weigh both equally. A good lesson, and one I am thankful for.

Dua Her-wer!