Update

I'm still out traveling for the holidays but did manage to carve out some quiet time this evening to attend the Dua. I am looking forward to tonight's celebrations.  I also RSVP'd for tonight's naming ceremony. (I mention this because several people wanted to know when it would be.) I apologize for the late notice, but it turns out computer time is rare in this household and this afternoon was the first time I have had a chance to get online in several days. I know I have seemingly been on radio silence since my RPD, but I am doing well. This has managed to be an excellent trip home and joyful Christmas despite the obvious sadness of my mother not being here in the flesh to share it with us. (There is more to say on that later when I have had time to write a proper post) On the whole, this has been a far happier trip to the city than the prior one. It is also amusing to me that I will be attending my naming ceremony from the same room where I attended my first beginner's class lesson. There is probably some symbolism in that which I will stumble over later, I'm sure.

Take care everyone, and Happy Moomas! :)

First Thoughts on My (Awesome) Dual Parentage

It was 2006 and the silence in the late-90s Impala was stifling. The sun outside was beating down heat from above and the black tar radiated the same from below. The ancient AC of the car struggled to keep up. The sickly whirl of its fan was the only sound to cling to as I waited for her response. My ostensibly liberal Christian co-worker seemed stunned.

 Of all the religions I could say she had not been prepared for me to say Kemetic and was even less prepared for my brief explanation of what it was. It’s a modern faith that reestablishes the worship of the ancient Egyptian pantheon. I told her calmly. I didn’t say the word pagan but I could see it reflected in her eyes nonetheless. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel and my first thought was that I had just made this the most awkward Wal-mart supply run ever.

RPD Results

There is that moment when She leaves the screen to complete the divination and you are left to think and pray and bite your nails. I went over the list in my head again—the list of all the Names I was prepared to hear, the mental gymnastics I would have to do for ones I hadn’t prepared for. Because I had said in shrine, aloud, that I would accept the results, whatever they were. I trust the Nisut (AUS) and I trust the process and I had committed to it fully before entering that chat room.

So there I was in ritual whites, sitting across the room from the festival altar I’d set up for the earlier Dua, listing names that I would be able to cope with, trying not to hope too desperately for Him.

Life will go on...it must...

I will find out on Friday who I belong to—I will learn the name(s) of my parent(s). Until last night, the sheer excitement of that statement was the focus of my whole world. The Solstice and its accompanying Kemetic festival occupied the highest priority for me and I felt honored and blessed to have my RPD done on such a wonderfully bright day that has meant so much to me in the past and that deepens in meaning each year.

But then came last night.

You know, at this point? I would honestly not be surprised to find a Name associated with death in my lineup. 

Note about the "Gift of the Curse" Series

Part 3 of Gift of the Curse is coming… eventually…but admittedly, probably not until sometime after the New Year. It’s proving more challenging to write than I had thought because I keep worrying about tone and whether I’m sounding elitist or not. I also can’t help the nagging feeling that I’m still living the conclusion of the post and trying to write about something that hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps this project was a tad ambitious given the relatively small amount of time I’ve been living with this new paradigm.

There are also other things happening which may shift my views yet again: December RPDs are getting scheduled and while I don’t yet know my specific date I do know that I will be one of those December RPDs. So needless to say…that is consuming my philosophical attentions at the moment. I didn’t figure anyone would be too disappointed if I took a short respite from the main post series to do some more RPD related entries. ;)

 [I base that last statement on the fact that the RPD tagged entries on my blog get way more page views than any other tag]

The Fourth Day

Strangely enough, this was written on time--just posted late. It turned out Thanksgiving was, far from being a distraction, a catalyst for focusing my thinking about this last bit. 

That's because Thanksgiving is a strange holiday for me. Since my brother and I started college, it has been a half-celebrated holiday in my home. Its traditions became inconsistent and casual. Of the last ten holidays, I have only spent three in my own home, only four with members of my own family. I spent this year’s dinner at a coworker’s house enjoying her traditions and her family’s company. I would say that it is sad or odd to be spending a family holiday away from home after what happened this summer but…

Home is a different word for me these days.

The Third Day

It’s hard for me to admit when I don’t know something. I’m not sure if that’s a matter of spending too much of my adolescent and adult life trying to live up to the “gifted” stereotype or a matter of ego, but either way, it leads to admissions like this one feeling awkward:

There are a lot of well-known Names that I know virtually nothing about...

The Second Day

I cannot think of a time in my life when I was able to easily focus on just one project, one skill, or one curiosity. The world is simply too full of grand ideas that demand to be played with, useful abilities to be gained, and interesting things to be explored. I have a kind of insatiability when it comes to novelty that carries over even into the spiritual part of my life. After all, there are literally hundreds of Names out there. There are enough well known ones to occupy a lifetime of study, and there are more than a few who have very little literature about them and are therefore intriguing in a different way.

The First Day

I can’t decide if the timing couldn’t be better or if it couldn’t be worse.

Hip deep in the debris of a kind of mental and metaphysical transformation I wake up to an e-mail in my inbox that would have been far easier to answer to if it had arrived a month ago. Having the RPD option on the table right now seems at once dangerous and a perfect way to speed things up a bit. There is a strong temptation to gain access to yet another little piece of the puzzle while I’m still in those early stages of reformation and foundation building…it could have a significant impact on this reconstruction of me. On the other hand, I’m also buzzing with Set’s energy right now and there is a small chance that doing anything even remotely community related might be disastrous in unforeseen ways.

It leads to a host of other problems as well:

I am now officially a Remetj! :D

Remetj.

That was really the only word I needed to see in my e-mail this week to suddenly be having the best week. And now, of course, I have been suffering from a severe compulsion to “READ ALL THE THINGS” on the parts of the forum that I couldn’t see before. But it’s more than that: it’s a step forward in a new world. As the high school I work at winds down from an early homecoming and gears up to start the first “real” weeks of the semester, I face the beginning of another year—one in which nothing is the same for me.

I realize that is an almost redundant statement: if we aren’t trapped in a cycle of stagnation, then things are almost never “the same” as they were in the years, days, or moments before we stopped to think on them. Yet… the timing of things this summer…

My world has changed in a fundamental way on many levels.  The world of Beginner was very different than the world of Solitary Kemetic in ways I wasn’t expecting—and I know that the world of Remetj will be different still from that of Beginner. I eagerly look forward to that change, but even as I overflow with excitement for that new, shiny future which dawns in the east, I mourn the slow fading of a different light as it sinks in the west.

For a long time, I have lived in the world of Mom as Everything—in fact this summer was christened by me as the “Summer of Mom” as soon as I heard the diagnosis in April…but I only called it that until I realized that it's really more correct to say “Lifetime of Mom”. I was so close to her. I can’t say that in words that would do her justice. My world was her. My mother filled a role for me that was as dangerous as it was beautiful: Mom as All, Mom as Other Half. Which makes learning to live in the world of Mom as Ancestor especially hard…

Next Saturday is already day 70.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, and yet, it feels infinitely longer. There is still a hard, sharp edge to the grief, but the wound her death caused has ceased bleeding now and it begins to pull back together as new skin grows to cover it.  That doesn’t mean it hurts any less, or that there won’t be a proverbial scar left behind, just that it isn’t a danger to me anymore. The pain is now a healing one, not a rending one.

I slowly return to myself. My hands go back to beading, my mind goes back to telling stories, and my deeper self goes back to dreaming up new destinies. My gods put tasks before me and the voice whispering within me prods me along the path. I call my brother and my father often; I speak to friends daily—and my heart is beating again. I plan and scheme and go about life in general. I am whole once more. I am hale.

The ancestor shrine is ready. The words of the prayer are already starting to echo in my heart and mind, reverberating in the unseen space I’ve made for her to inhabit when she returns from her journey. I am not certain what to expect. I am not certain what she will be now. I am not certain because, for all I knew of her, I still only knew her as one of the living. She will be different. She will be changed by death. It is my firm belief that all souls are. I welcome that change even as I fear it. I will accept her in any form she takes, but there is no way to prepare for the moment when I first catch a glimpse of her transformed and transfigured self.

So much of life is about not knowing how you will react to things, but finding the courage to keep your eyes open anyway.

A few months ago, I didn’t know how I would react to the Beginner’s class. I didn’t know if I would be impressed or disappointed, satisfied or left wanting, finally connected or more alone then ever… I didn’t know if I could come to terms with the idea of the RPD or if I would be able to accept the Nisut (AUS). Would I feel anything during Senut? Could I really learn to connect with my ancestors? Would I really hear the voices of the other Netjeru if I put Set’s statue away? Could I bear to put his statue away long enough to find out? It was those uncertainties which had kept from applying for the class years before when I first heard of the temple. I only applied this summer because after six years, I had eventually realized that there was no way to know the answers but to discover them by experience.

I wrote here once, a long time ago it feels like, about trust. I have something to add to that:

I trust now.

 I trust the Nisut (AUS). I trust the process and rite of RPD. I trust this community. I trust Senut. I trust my ancestors. I trust all of the Netjeru, when they speak, and I trust Set, even when he is silent. And in all of that trust, I have found what I had not dared to hope for. I am impressed, not disappointed. I am satisfied, not left wanting. I am connected, not alone. I have gained something which was not in the lessons proper but somewhere between the lines:

I am prepared even when I am unprepared. I am ready even when I am not ready. I have learned to put some trust in existence. I didn’t realize that I needed to learn that, and at first, I didn’t realize that I had learned it. Until I thought about it this week when I was buying flowers for the ancestor shrine…

Everything is in balance now. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect or even that it’s comfortable, but it does mean that it is inherently bearable. It doesn’t have to be fair that my mother was taken from me so young. It doesn’t have to make sense that the cancer came back when she had been doing so well. It simply is what it is. The important part is that this terrible thing did not go unbalanced on the scales: there have been blessings along the way to soften the blow (I cannot even fully express how much the beginner’s class, and the HoN community in general, helped in all of this—simply by existing and taking me in and giving me something to hold on to), and there were Names who stepped in to steady me when I started to fall.

 Balance. Fairness. These things are not about individual events and single grains of rice, they are about sums and the weight of the crops against the need for them. The scales dip and soar as they even out, and as long as all eventually returns to the calm, steady equilibrium that makes things functional…that’s really all I can ask for.

Wow. That got overly philosophical toward the end there. I really did start this just to announce that I’m now a Remetj. I suppose that means the title of the post is now a bit misleading.

Sorry about that.  XD