Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Tend the Hearth

Hello blog. I've missed you!

I'm still working on my ADF DP, but am taking a new approach to how I'm scheduling the work. I love the idea of the DP Through the Wheel of the Year publication, but the only thing it's been doing is allowing my perfectionist tendencies to sabotage my work.

I like to procrastinate when I get overwhelmed or too concerned about "doing it right", and trying to do everything in a lock-step program doesn't help me when I fall off the wagon for a week or two. I feel like I need to start over.

So I set up my own schedule based on getting things done about over the course of a year, but not so inter-dependent. I need to sit down tonight and do the Ostara ritual that the DH wrote up last weekend.

I don't know that I'll blog much here about the DP, in the future. Probably a bit here and there. What I really wanted to talk about today was a message I got during a meditation several months ago. My coven had done a guided meditation during moon ritual where we would ask the Gods what we might be able to give back to the community.

As a parting note from Brigit, I got "Tend the Hearth".

As communiques from the Gods go, it's always the short ones that are the most multi-dimensional. In the ensuing months, "tend the hearth" has come to mean many things to me. Beyond the most literal sense of home fires and tending to domestic issues, I've also found it to mean:
  • Minding your own business/tending to your own affairs
  • Keeping track of your health (tending your personal hearth fires)
  • Allowing your personal spirituality (your hearth) to be a beacon to others
  • Growing the flame of your personal spirituality
  • Getting through a harsh winter (or end of winter, anyway, here in Maryland.
This week, it's become important in an ongoing situation with a pagan message board I've visited on and off for many years, mostly in the "mind your own" sense. It's time for me to back away from the place, as the atmosphere there is no longer conducive to my spiritual needs. It's changed, I've changed... it's like waking up one day and realizing that your best friend from childhood no longer have much of anything in common.

I am sad.

But, I have other places to turn for spiritual support and fellowship. Right now, I'm really craving the fellowship. While I need to rekindle my own personal spiritual practices (again, with tending the hearth) as far as devotionals, prayers, magic, etc, I also need the energy that group work and socializing can provide to relight that fire. As within, so without... as without, so within.
Creative Commons License
The Spiraling Flame blog by Karen Mitchell Carothers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.