spirituality – Page 2

Part 2 in my series about the spiritual toys and tools that have remained a part of my practice (or are part of it again, or have become important to me since I’ve started getting my groove back).

I love prayer beads. I love the ritual, of course, and I love coming up with repetitive prayers and chants to use with them. I love how tactile they are, how smooth and cool stone beads feel in my fingers. I feel like using beads links me up to hundreds of years of seekers and the devoted from all over the world.

At last count I had two sets. One was specifically dedicated to Persephone, so I wasn’t using them much once Winter came to an end. I found them on Etsy and they feel amazing! There’s something solid and comforting about them that I find instantly anchoring. They’re made with carnelian and rose quartz beads.

The other set I actually had customized by another Etsy shop, and it didn’t have a particular dedication but was more all-purpose. It’s primarily moss agate with a silver oak leaf on one end and a Tree of Life on the other.

I love using both, but as I said, the first set has a particular energy to it that I don’t feel called to use the whole year. In addition, the version of the Goddess I am currently drawn to has two faces, and right now I’m working with the lighter half, who is a Lunar and stellar goddess not based on any specific tradition’s deity but to whom, for now, I refer to simply as Theia.

I’ll have more to say about Them later on. For now, suffice it to say I decided I wanted a set of prayer beads for Theia, but weeks of shopping online came up with nothing that really felt right.

While it may be lacking in the pre-made strand I wanted, one thing Etsy does have is a metric buttload of beads.

Careful shopping came up with the ingredients you see in the wee bowls: Blue kyanite and dumortierite as the main beads; tiny fluted silver spacers; silver leafy ovals as section beads (I believe in a Rosary each section of beads is called a decade), and for the end pieces, a flowered, stylized pentacle for one end and the Moon phases for the other. Add to that some monofilament procured from my roommate (who makes awesome jewelry), and I was ready to go.

I’d kind of forgotten what a pain making prayer beads can be – the first 99% of the strand took about 20 minutes, but getting that last knot on the Moon phase pendant took an hour! It’s still not perfect, but perfection is an illusion anyway, right? Better to have a thing made and use it than to stare at an imperfectly made thing and never get it finished!

Yeah, we’ll go with that.

The result is, if I do say myself, gorgeous. The blue kyanite beads are translucent, and the dumortierite have swirls of blue and blue-black. All the silver gleams.

I’m keeping them in a wooden bowl my mom gave me years ago, which won’t break when the cats inevitably knock it off my bedside shelf. My other two strands each have a container on my altar – the tree beads are in a fluorite bowl and the Persephone beads are in a pomegranate-shaped box. I wanted my new ones to be safe and within easy reach.

What do I do with my beads, you ask? Well, they function basically like any other of their ilk whether a Rosary, Mala, or Misbaha. I have a rotating selection of four-line (or so) chants and prayers that I mentally recite while holding each bead with my right fingers while the other end of the strand rests in my left hand. I start with an invocation at one end – with these beads, the beginning is the Moon phase pendant.

At each oval-shaped “decade” bead, I pause and say a different prayer, usually something that I make up on the spot. Then I go back to the original prayer until the next oval bead. At the end, I finish with an expression of gratitude of some sort.

Sometimes I stop there, and sometimes I go back along the strand until I’m where I started. Sometimes I just think the words, sometimes I murmur them, sometimes I sing quietly. I frequently change things up as I go depending on what feels right, and sometimes I will use the same set of words for a set period of time (say a Lunar cycle) or for a specific purpose (soothing anxiety).

Here’s an example, just to show you how I do it. A lot of this is borrowed from other sources and varied traditions, some of which I don’t even remember, but I use phrases like these in most of my prayers. You’re welcome to use it if you like but please don’t repost it as I didn’t create every line. The sources I can recall are listed at the end of the post. Enjoy!

MOON PHASE PENDANT:
I call upon the Mystery of the Starlit night,
The beauty of the green Earth,
Mother of all things;
I call upon the radiant Queen of the heavens,
Heart’s light and soul’s longing,
Whose hands weave the tapestry of constellations.

INDIVIDUAL BEADS:
Hail, Star of the Sea;
Enfoldment of all enfoldments
whose love is poured out upon the Earth,
Be with me.

OVAL BEADS:
Goddess, tonight I am (however I’m feeling),
(reason for how I’m feeling if I know it);
I pray You will help me find (something I need) to sustain/guide/strengthen/etc me
And keep watch on your wandering child.

PENTACLE PENDANT:
Mother of all things, I give thanks
For the beauty of the Earth,
For the glory of the skies
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies; [yes I absolutely stole that]
I thank You for Your blessings
And for Your presence here tonight.
Blessed be.

Sources/Influences:
Doreen Valiente, “The Charge of the Goddess”
Gael Baudino, Strands of Starlight
Folliott S. Pierpoint, “For the Beauty of the Earth”

This week of shelter-in-place has been harder for me than those previous, I suppose because we’ve officially passed one month here in Austin since the order was given and at bare minimum there are two more coming, though who knows? At this rate the tiny army of depressingly privileged idiot white people protesting against saving the lives of people who do labor for them might get their way, and they’ll have regained the freedom to force poorer people to cut their hair and paint their nails and bring them the Red Blooded ‘Murcan Platter at TGIFriday’s or whatever so stock prices can go up-up-up and human beings can be cut down-down-down.

Anyway.

As you can probably tell, the whole situation is taking a toll on me, as I’m sure it is on you too. The world has already worn out my Last Good Nerve and I’m down to basically the Bottom of the Dollar Store Bin Nerve. Thank god for meditation, medication, and masturbation, am I right?

(I may cut that line, or I may just bask in its ridiculous glory for all the internet to see.)

At any rate, I didn’t come here to rant and rave like a lunatic, I actually came to talk like a Lunatic about the Dark Moon, the New Moon, and the early Waxing phase in the lunar cycle.

In my experience a lot of people of a mystical/magical bent lump the Dark and New Moons together in terms of their spiritual and magical significance. You certainly could do that; after a time of waning energy, of divesting Herself of her glowing raiment one shoulder at a time, the Moon vanishes from the sky for a moment and we’re left in a period of vast, star-flecked potential.

Over time however I’ve come to recognize a subtle but important difference in the energy of the Dark Moon (where there is no Moon visible at all) and the New Moon (when a sliver of light appears, the leading edge of Diana’s bow), as well as how those two periods relate to the rest of the waxing phase.

When the Moon is completely dark I feel more of an urge to go inward than to cast magic or energy outward. I want to curl up in the roots of a tree and stare up through her leaves at the stars. It’s a moment of pause, like the actual event of death, the breath ceasing, the brain stilling. The month to be hasn’t drawn in its breath quite yet. Everything is balanced, waiting, empty. It’s the kind of darkness that can hold your dreams as well as your nightmares; it’s all in which shadows you peer into.

The Dark Moon is the time to dream. To plan. To make your lists, or just to take your desires and hopes to the Source and figure out where you’ll go next. Deep contemplation is needed here; the time for banishing work and decrease is done but it’s not quite time to get a move on.

As soon as that fingernail of light appears, the energy shifts. Time begins to move forward again with a relieved inhalation. That is the time to begin. Gather your jars, your candles; gather up your desires and toss them in big glittery handfuls to the wind, cast them into water, set them alight. As the Moon’s light waxes, the energy builds, starting with a few baby steps and, by the time the Moon is full, running full tilt, bare naked over the hills.

I think a lot of people gloss over the need to observe the Dark Moon. Going within, as many people are being forced to do right now, is hard for most of us. We’re afraid of the quiet, the dark – but nighttime holds up half the sky, and to jump from dusk to dawn is to miss a huge opportunity to explore our own interior landscape and just…sit still and shut up for a minute.

Sitting there in the dark (which is never fully dark, even on a cloudy night some light remains, just as in the brightest day something is casting a shadow) we can pick out our seeds and make sure we have the soil to plant them in. When the New Moon rises we can stick our fingers in the dirt and get those babies growing. Water will come; it always comes to the Moon.

If we try to think of our quarantime as its own sort of Dark Moon, the potential for change becomes clearer. I’m talking on a micro scale, on an individual basis, for those of us who have the time and privilege to tap into that potential rather than, say, spending 16 hour days on our feet in a hospital or working ourselves into tatters to keep house, teach children, police children, feed our families, work an 8 hour day in a chaotic house, and hopefully sleep in there somewhere. Not everyone has the luxury of choosing how to spend these weeks, but if you do, I highly recommend meditating on the spaces inside that mirror the spaces overhead.

Let’s see where this next cycle takes us.

Tag: spirituality

Stringing My Prayer Beads

A More Literal Sort of Lunacy