feast day

the candle i decorated for my imbolc pledge did not get enough love on ritual night (i mean, it could be argued that i was largely the source of my own distraction, what with my salty pledge and setting fires with my mind and such) so it is presented here, far left. love it, please. that's the point. several layers of repurposed gift tissue torn up, tie dyed, and occasionally stamped around a jar covered with a layer of red glass paint.

today, probably for the first time, i had another magic worker perform a small service for me. i wrote out my petition last night and felt the deity tugging at me, wanting to ground her ritual in my own space, so i set up a spot for her on this little wall shelf i got for yule. immediately beneath that, almost a serendipitous aspect of my petition, we have:



i've been meaning to write about the blooming burning corazon piece since the beginning of the year. i'd ordered it a few weeks before my thyroidectomy, in part because something about the design reminded me of a thyroid and i thought, well, at least i can have an analog around the house. it arrived with an element of the design missing, which felt like a bad omen - just... trust me on that.

i went back and forth on whether or not i should complain. my inner american consumer was all, assert yourself! get all the tin wing-like leaves that you paid for! you deserve perfect! don't dare settle for anything less! at the very least, i worried that i should demand a partial refund (or have the vendor check to see if the missing piece was lying around somewhere in their warehouse), but in the end i didn't have the (ha, ha) heart for it.

deep down, it's always felt like the piece was meant to come to me broken. that it came into being for me, specifically, at that specific point in my life. it was where my own heart was on many levels. still, i felt self-conscious about the whole matter. the imperfect art, my lack of plucky american-go-for-it-aggression in not even attempting to correct that imperfection; then this lopsided thing that was supposed to be a comfort while i was in recovery from cancer treatment that, instead, made me feel guilty every time i looked at it. i spent the following three years positioning it to hide the missing element and contemplating some variety of surgical intervention.

then, on a bad day this january, my eyes fell on it and something whispered: hold the wound. i thought about the japanese discipline of kintsugi - repairing damaged ceramic pieces with gold leaf - and realized that i shouldn't be hiding the missing element or feeling any kind of shame about it. instead, i could emphasize that absence, almost celebrate it; use that lack in a prayerful way.

so i present to you: my traumatized heart, in all its poorly lit glory. three pheasant feathers replace the missing element.