PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

This week, beautiful and fertile Hathor comes into our reading to encourage us to see the bounty all around us. For many in the Northern Hemisphere, it's the tail end of Winter -- things are brown and dreary, or even still covered with a blanket of snow, and it seems as though the blossoms and sprouts of Spring are a million years away. This Winter has been hard for many of us, this Priestess included, with depression and even despair creeping in around the edges as a seemingly endless string of tragedies, scandals, and losses unfurl in the news every day. It can be hard to remember to count our blessings, to revel in the love and bounty around us, and to keep the faith that spring will come. But Hathor is here to remind us.

All that you have is your soul.

Tracy Chapman

I spent this weekend celebrating Beltaine, the arrival of the season of fertility and growth, with my local community here in Dallas-Fort Worth. While it's been spring for a while here in Texas, it's been a mild and wet spring -- but this past week has brought the first real days of springtime sunshine. The landscape is vivid green punctuated with our signature wildflowers -- bluebonnets, Indian paintbrush, primroses, and Queen Anne's lace. The open community ritual I attended (presented by the Texas Local Council of the Covenant of the Goddess) took place in a sun-dappled grove of trees, and was followed by community feasting and socializing. Things have certainly begun stirring beneath the Earth, and within me, which are bursting to be born into the light.

These past months have seen me spending a great deal of time reflecting on the directions in which I'd like to grow, particularly in my career. As an adjunct professor, I am part of a chronically and drastically underpaid workforce. The work I do feeds my soul and feels like a calling, but often leaves me (and people like me) struggling just to pay our bills. This winter has been a season of confronting my feelings about poverty and lack, about my work, and about what I want the next phase of my life to bring -- in terms of work, relationships, spirituality, and more. (Why yes, I did just turn 40. Why do you ask?)

Compassion spills and overflows
The oceans of my Soul
Each drop moving through
Rivulets of prismatic depths.

A cadence of virtuosity as
Fingers move in pizzicato
Rhythm across ephemeral strings
The sounds of empathetic release.

Seeker of that which is
Just beyond the grasp
Slips like liquid sand through
The funnel of glass measured time.

And Devotion pools at the base
Of sun-parched throats
That willingly endure the pain
To spare another the distress.

Martyr and miracle
Saint and sacrifice
Each flow in opposition
Until the waters clear And the darkened path
Of return is revealed.

Within the shadowy depths
Of quickening waters
Creation heeds the call
As a newly formed compassion
Fills my thirst-quenched Soul.   

The focus of my personal spiritual practice for many years has been the refining of my emotions and the catalyzing of my creative will. The work I’ve had to do to accomplish this has been directed through the process of enlivening my energetic anatomy with the goal of sustaining those resultant changes in physical and manifest expression. For years, I drew on the knowledge base I have of the Eastern practices of breath work, yoga and the Kundalini serpent in combination with magickal workings. These applications worked well, but there was still a large piece missing that felt like a puzzle that has all of the pieces save the one most important end corner. I offered up the hunger I had for a deeper experience to my guides and was called to the Halls of the Egyptian Deities and the wisdom of their ancient alchemy.