Five Elements Through Five Senses: Water (October 15th to October 29th)
Seeing Spirit
So many things make my feel aware of spirit. The rain. The rising and setting of the sun, watching the sky, fire, all the colors of the rainbows forming and unforming across the beautiful endless expanse. Brushing back the hair of someone I love or getting lost in laughter.
I tried this with several of the suggested pieces in the exercise write up.
I looked into a crystal ball thinking about the past and future and the present. Sort of thinking of Spirit as the crystal ball itself. The piece through which everything is seen and can be seen, in either direction. It's the mechanism through which both we exist and we are.
I several Goddess objects in my bedroom and house that I walked around thinking about. I'm not sure I see Spirit the way I want to be seeing it for this class, and yet maybe it's just the I classify it as 'Divine' in my head. Which I suppose is the same thing.
Holy Spirit. The Divine. The Spark. The Magick.
I spent time with two of the best loved ones I could have chosen, this weekend and earlier this week, but things were so fraught with other things, that the whole exercise part of observing was rather lost and knotted up. Instead of finding my intention I had to work on other things with that part of my time.
Mirrors help, but then mirrors have such amazing depth and power and magic to me. I used to cover my house with them anywhere I could. I used to have a huge gateway mirror. I still have a massive dresser mirror. And black mirrors and tiny mirrors. I believe there is truth in appearance, reflection, recognition.
The easiest one for me was the last example.
People watch and strive to see Spirit in everyone.
This line is the very line of my heart. Just the first time I read I felt like my heart expanded with soft abandon. I love to watch people. I love people. They are filled and fueled with so much endless beauty and majesty. The sum of their parts, the making of their paths, able to remake themselves each day, surmounting the insurmountable, forgiving the unforgivable, making possible the most impossible dreams.
People. In people I see the very heart, the very soul of this universe, this life. I expand with such awe and humility and reverence watching them. In them Divinity touches my being so strongly, steals all purpose to the brightest point of my existence.
Touching Spirit
Oh, Spirit through touch.
Some parts of this make me leery, thinking about things touching me, but at the same time I think about how I am a Taurus. A creature of touch. I express my joy and comfort through an ability to touch. I find myself relieved by touch that is without condition from others. I express my confusion and distress by a complete lack of it.
Which I'm so aware of recently.
I haven't spent a lot of time in my space recently, while dog sitting for my parents. I'm not in my house nor in my space where there usually some kind of minimal contact with my roommate at least. It's just an empty house, which is a little lacking after a busy, emotionally caustic period.
I have gotten to spend time petting the dogs though, and I even had this sort of beautiful moment where when I came home for an evening earlier this weekend (before heading back to the parent's house) I was in love with having one of the cats come curl up next to me. Being adored on by that small, beautiful life that missed me.
So there was that much.
I did the exercises for touching your own skin, too. To run your hands and fingers over your own skin, feeling the movement of your skin, your pulse, heartbeat, the different ways my chest and stomach rise and fall with each breath. The different textures and pressures of breathing out through my nose and mouth. The texture of my lips, the delicacy of the throat, the sensation of eyelashes flickering.
Touching my skin the way I would touch another that I love, in expression or devotion. To memorize, to know, to commemorate and celebrate.
This one brought up so many conflicted feelings. About how I feel about touching others, and how long I went without being touched at all, and the stupidity of missing out on things only inches from me, and grace, hope, forgiveness...which I'm so much less inclined to give to myself as freely as to any other person I don't even know.
Objects always resonate for me, so it was hard to pick anything specific to work with for the last exercise. I always pull tarot cards based on how the feel of my fingertips change when they hover over them.
I definitely end up feelings this with stones and herbs and oils, a lot. It's part of why I work with them. I feel more in touch with the world around me as I'm working on my wishes or requests or prayers or magic.
I choose necklace charms and pocket stones this way. Pennies on the ground. A stray flower. I trust in the universe to know what I need see, have, touch, use, bring into contact with me more than I do.
I feel so intimately part and parcel and cared for by the divine. The breeze against my face. The heat trapped in my car. The sensation of needing to call someone or being connected to those closest to me. I feel like there's always a vibration in everything, whether we call it Spirit or Divinity or Magnetic Charge or Intuition, that taps you into the universe all around you.
Smelling Spirit
This one was dissociatively hard for me. It's all about oils and herbs which are second nature normal to me, but while I'm working with them it doesn't make me of Spirit.
I had all three of the herbs, but while each of them smelled their own way, none of them made me feel or think about Spirit except in a way where I was mostly forcing myself to try to.
Sage, especially, mostly left me to my mind wandering. To pipe ceremonies and using it to burn in houses. There's too much association here and mostly I ended up thinking about how things associate and where they come from.
And I didn't get much out of it at all, even when struggling and trying to force myself to.
I tried the second one about creating Sacred Space in whatever space you consider sacred, so I chose my main altar. It was a little easier when I consider it that way, even if it was more tinted toward the scents I'm associating with my path to the Spirit this year rather than wholesale Spirit-Everything-Always.
The scent of the Goddess incenses from my Beata class saved for ever. The oils and herbs from all of the recipes from all the four elements in this class. All the oils for my Chakra work. The coconut candle in my tiny shrine on my main altar to my year working with Air.
Like growth and the multifaceted differences. Knowing it will always be changing and changed, every year, for every person and in every face. I feel like I'm still stretching for this one, but I think it's also in some part of my first thought at the beginning of this.
Spirit is in every smell, it's just who is smelling it and why and how.
Hearing Spirit
Spirit seems to be the hardest and easiest in differently certain amounts this week. I smiled and laughed at different parts of just reading the write-up for it.
At the beginning of this month, while running a class day for a large group of women over the Crown Chakra, we focused a lot on silence. The power of it, the weight of it, the sound of it. How it felt to be in silence. It's such a big thing, and I've been turning over and over since that day a phrase I gave my sisters to focus on in a meditation that day.
Speech requires a reason, silence does not.
I'm deeply in love with silence lately. Holding silence, the sacredness of silence. And to think it was all born out of a land, last year, where silence was the willing cage that came along with travel and exploration of my soul and the world. And now it's thrown me somewhere bran new even in a world surrounding me in familiar sounds.
I'm very much looking forward to the potentially talked about weekend away with a few women which would be spent entirely in silence. It sounds so big and powerful.
In the instructions about music exercise there is a line that says 'let yourself hear the Spirit' and it made me think a lot about music and something my girlfriend said not too many months ago. I am a seventeen year trained soprano, and I have a hard drive and iPod that continues to grow by a cd or three every week, and she was right in easy declaration:
You process the world in music.
And I do. Frequently. How I'm feeling, what I'm thinking, if I need something in the background to be calming my mind (no matter where that happens to be soft or loud based types). There is a land in music that I dissolve into that goes beyond my skin and my breath. I, almost completely unjokingly, will tell people that there is no orgasm as good as pure music when you're performing.
And I think both of this statements have a lot to do with how I might be perceiving Spirit in sound/music, even if I'd never considered it in this kind of way until seeing the write up for this part of Spirit. Music is this part of my world where everything else vanishes into sound and the feeling of giving up all of this world when singing.
Even when I'm not thinking about it, half the time I'll be singing. Under my breath or in my head. The smallest flashes of pieces of music are brought up by the randomest thing every day of my life.
So I think, yes, maybe I do find Spirit in almost all musical sound. And get to hear it coming forth out of me even.
Tasting Spirit
I thought about cakes and ale, a topic that's been recurring this year in so many different ways.
The recent group wide meeting in RCG for handling the topic of alcohol, when I said it was my only one place I ever expected wine in ritual. Or how much I find distaste with the way Sacred Well has I feel kind of juvenile antics during it while still in circle/sacred space.
It's the one place I will never comment when handed a cookie or a chunk of bread, where even if I don't eat the whole thing (and it's more likely I will), even if I donate it to the trees and grass and birds and animals, it will only be after I've eaten some part of it first.
Cakes and Ales makes people think of just that. Cake and Ale. But it's a title, for the offering/celebratory part of a ritual and it's the same each time the Sacramental Cup or Bread of Christ is. It changes often. Like one my Mabon rituals handed out apple slices dipped in caramel sided by cider. I've had any number of things. Candies, seeds, nuts, fruits, breads. Wines, juices, water.
It depends on the group a lot, and the focus of the ritual. But in this act I always find Spirit. Connection. Quite like the Sacrament and the Body, and it is the reason I won't take the wine or wafer when I attend for a performance of my parents. I can see-feel how Holy it is even when it isn't mine.
And mine. I feel divine in Cakes and Ale sometimes, as though I'm literally tasting the season, breads and pomegranates, wines and ciders, as though the whole world's turning bursts into clarity in my mouth. As though even my tongue learns the lay of the land in whatever I am celebrating, whether a sabbat or a class with a wholly different intention.
While this didn't happen during my exercise, my recognition of it was brought to such a high height because of it.
And that's the end of my Five Elements Through Five Senses class. This part was done a while back, as you can tell by the dates of when the pieces for class were written. I'm still waiting to put the finishing touches on this section, because I have gotten or done the oils and incenses for this set, but I was starting to feel it was getting too far away from the dates when the work was done and its companion pieces.
It was a lovely little class, that put me more in touch with how I thought about the elements and myself perceiving them on different levels. It'll give me things to think about for a long time to come, and a beautiful box of instruments to use for a long time that were part of the whole process.