Pausing to reflect ...

This past week has been a blur: moving; discovering one roommate’s room is infested with some kind of insect; bringing my cat to my mom’s house during the fumigation/my mom’s handfasting; and dealing with said handfasting and the accompanying blur of guests. I have been sleeping on a mattress in my rather sizeable closet and have done tons and tons of my mother’s dishes.

Of course, I also watched this awesome video about Dionysos (via T. Thorn Coyle on G+ and Sannion on his blog!), which offered some incredible grounding during the entire experience.

I prayed to Apollôn last night. Even though Kyklos Apollon has officially moved the ritual to the seventh day of the lunar month (with the first day of the lunar month beginning the day after the dark/new moon), I still maintain the weekly cultus, but sometimes don’t actually pray on Saturday night if I am too tired to string prayers together sensibly.

Yesterday evening, I lit cinnamon-frankincense incense and ran through my abbreviated hymn to Apollôn using the prayer beads that I have had for the past few years and went to bed. I prayed again this morning after showering and read from sections of the Iliad.

Prayer is ultimately about giving to the MAKARES, but it can also be about grounding oneself in things that are important: rising incense, sacred stories, and the brightness of candle flames. It is such a relief sometimes to move from drowning in masses of people and spending six hours cleaning a kitchen/putting away leftover wedding food while everyone else mows through beer and wine — the shrine, by comparison, is small and intimate like a quiet conversation over coffee with a good friend.