Illness and Illumination

The last 12 days have been challenging and interesting indeed.
Starting on 10th March, when our car burst into flames on the highway and carrying on through our inability to get the car started again, a battle to find a rental car service which didn't require a small ransom of a hold on our credit cards- not to mention the little matters of Libya and Japan -I'm hardly surprised that I haven't actually performed the ritual of Rushing Dark Water yet.

Well, actually it was more down to a sudden and vicious bout of 'flu which grabbed me, shaking and shivering , on Sunday night and saw me delirious and in pain until this morning.
I have made up the incense, put aside golden candles and marked the ritual passage in my Book of Shadows, so I suspect that I'll be out in the circle tomorrow night at the latest.

In the meantime, I have gathered a sense of what life is going to be like when none of us can afford petrol anymore. Walking to the garage for milk and bread through our delightfully life-rich suburb with children playing in the streets, families walking back from church and belligerent dogs left to roam outside their owners' properties is a worthwhile education in itself, and taking the hour-long hike to the nearest small supermarket -through the bush and across the river on stepping stones- opens your eyes to some details of other peoples' lives indeed. The metres of electric cable covering abandoned on the bush path  near our substation in particular provided insight into lives far more desperate from our own, and the constant cheery greetings from fellow bush-whackers underlines perhaps the more humanising effect of not always going everywhere in a damned car.

Then again there was the precious illumination granted so often to us when we are severely ill: an effect noted by many others over the years. There I was, on Sunday night, using psychic techniques to dull the pain in my kidneys and muscles, shivering and sweating and unable to fall asleep, staring up at the join in the ceiling boards in the dark. The line blurred and fuzzed, and I felt my consciousness as a field extending quite some way from my physical body. The top of my head seemed to open wide, and I knew again that I was an experience module in a larger field, outside of which there is Nothing and within which is Everything.

This experience of remembering who we are comes from time to time - not often, but frequently enough to remind me, that I should not forget in this lifetime. I treasure the remembering, for it is perhaps the only thing of which I am really sure. That we are, as Hecate puts it :Goddess pouring Goddess into Goddess, and that's All it is, and that's more than enough.

Now that I'm on the mend and we have the use of a rental car for the week I'm going to find time to say something about combining Juniper and Buchu as a sovereign remedy for aching kidneys. Maybe tomorrow.

Pic: Jessica . I'm waiting for the source from Jacurutu, and I will then attribute it.