After waking and showering, I did my opening ritual and meditation in silence. I was feeling rather anxious and apprehensive about the whole day - not only the prospect of not speaking until my night ritual, but also about the night ritual itself.
Using yarn and some twigs I had gathered the day before, I made 3 little yarn dolls in honor of Erigone -- one black, one red, one white. Each one turned out quite different. I would have liked to have made more, but I wanted to get to the park before sundown.
My partner came with me to the park to go swinging. I chose to go to the park next to the house where I grew up. Though only a half hour or so from my current home, it had been a while since I'd been to the area and it always feels odd to see the things that have changed and the things that have stayed the same. I was happy to see all the familiar trees in the park, and sad to see that all the trees I'd known at the house I grew up were gone.
When we first got there, there was a large flock of birds swooping around the western sky. There were a couple groups of teenagers in the park but none on the swings. We put on some flying ointment and spent some time swinging. The sky was overcast and although we felt a drop or two of rain, it never rained outright. I had a hard time focusing, so I just tried to pay attention to the sensation of swinging, particularly with my eyes closed. I smoked a clove cigarette and we passed the wine back and forth a couple times. Not speaking started making me feel like I was occupying a slightly different space than everyone else.
We walked around the park so I could look for trees to hang the red and black dolls. (The white one I kept and later hung in the tree outside my apartment.) I had left a long string of yarn on each, which came in handy because I wanted to get them to branches above arm's reach. I had to literally swing them back and forth to get enough momentum to get them over the branch. This took a few tries for each. At one point, I dropped one and as a reached down I saw that it had fallen next to a dead bird which I hadn't seen until that point, which was a little disconcerting.
I wasn't quite ready to leave yet, so we sat in the middle of a field (what felt like "center" to me) and faced west where the last of the sunlight was fading. We spent some time quietly sensing the energy of each other and the earth beneath us. I wouldn't have been surprised to see ghosts walking around in the fading light.
Later that evening after dinner, I made preparations for my ritual. I sequestered myself, I stared into the eyes of the mask I had made, used my voice for the first time that day to call forth the god, and performed my version the hieros gamos. And without going into more detail or trying to describe or what should only be described in poetry, if anything, for now I'll just say...
Holy fuck.
I was in a daze for a little while afterwards, time and memory playing tricks on me, and even though it was only around midnight, I ended up laying down for about 3 hours of sleep, and then suddenly waking up very alert. I played a computer game for a while, read and recovered, then went back to sleep at 9:30 or so. I journaled some notes for myself at some point, too, thank goodness, because even glancing back now it's amazing how easily those truer moments slip away.
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