Archive for September, 2011

My heart is flying right now and colored a familiar shade of red.

FenCon was fucking amazing. I have never been to a con before, but this one was about 15 minutes from where we work, and J was so excited about it because Joe Bethancourt would be there. It was Friday evening, Saturday all day, and then most of the day Sunday (closed at 5).

I met a fellow Sekhmet follower, one of the ladies in the dealer room who was selling beautiful jewelry that was way too brilliant and vivid for me. I bought a beautiful antler-tip pendant with subtle curly carvings on the top from her, the only item that she had that jived with my style; I kept putting it down and picking it back up again, which is usually a sign that I’mma get something.

I was wearing a silver Celtic/Nordic lion pendant, and she said, “I see you like Nordic stuff,” and I said, “Well, yeah, Celtic, Nordic, and Egyptian.” She said, “I’m right there with you on the Egyptian stuff,” so I did what I will occasionally, rarely do, and I pulled the Sekhmet pendant from beneath my shirt and showed her.

She broke into a grin. “Sekhmet!”

“You recognize Her!” I replaced the pendant beneath my shirt. “Not many do.”

She smiled at me. “She’s my goddess.”

My heart leapt at those words. Click, there you go – two strangers beaming at each other across a card table, excited and happy and a little awed at making that connection, at sharing something intimate and unusual.

PS~ There was a live SJ Tucker concert in Redmond this weekend, and it was recorded! You can watch it here – there are a lot of songs I haven’t heard before, which surprises and delights me. =3

I have been wanting a $100+ book about Twtw (Tutu/Tithoes) for about a year now, give or take. I have been lusting after it. It is the book on Twtw, an entity I find endlessly fascinating and compelling.

And with his first paycheck, J performed a book tithe and gifted me this book. It arrived today.

And then I arted. Fourth painting, and you know? It came out how I intended. I’m happy. Click through to see a larger version!

Okay so I’m actually giddy and hyper-excited about the book+painting+squee, so uh, “happy” might be an understatement.

(And if you were wondering, yes, that picture was taken with everything resting on a djembe. Also, the background is way more subtle in person, and the outline is in silver, not white.)

I tried painting, this weekend. I have never before painted on a canvas, and I was using my decade-old acrylics from back when I used to paint ceramics. I bought little 4×6″ canvas boards (and a couple 3×3″ black stretched canvas…es) and a small handful of new metallic paints. (When it comes to paints, I am a magpie. Shiny things attract me.) I had plenty of canvas boards, so I didn’t have to worry about making the first few good – I just wanted to see how paints acted on canvas.

I think some part of me must have gotten its hopes up that my first thing would be totally awesome, because I was disappointed when it wasn’t. But I learned something nifty I could do with texture, which made it quite useful. My second painting (which I will show you in a minute) also did not come out quite as intended, but I like it better than the first, though they’re so different as to be incomparable. When my sister saw the second, she liked it enough that I painted her a customized similar thing, which is by far the best of the three, but is hers to share if she so wishes, as it is personal to her.

I will show you the second painting now, with the preface that I am learning and you’re not allowed to critique it. :D I like the style, though I am still practicing how to do finer line-weights with a brush, and may do others of a better nature soon. Anyways, click to see a larger version:

In Egyptian mythology, the sky (Nut) and earth (Geb) loved each other so much that they refused to part, so their father, the god of air (Shu) had to stand between them and hold the sky up, so that life could exist on earth. Below them, in the underworld, you see Wesir on His throne and Nebt-het behind Him, though Nebt-het is not canonically supposed to be there. >_>;; Also you have Ap-p, the chaos serpent, and the Eye of Ra lioness goddess with Her seven arrows (plague, generally) fighting it off. Again, not totally canon, as normally Ap-p attacks Ra in His sun barque when it’s underground during the night, but hey, I was playing around.

Still kinda want to do a more true-to-mythology version, though…

My sister is doing some amazing work with writing songs for Netjeru, and thus inspired, I took the little thing I wrote for Nebt-het and a candle and my beloved classical guitar to the bedroom. (J was in the living room, alternately rocking out on his electric guitar or coffee-painting.)

Let me preface this: I am not a confidant guitarist. I am learning. I know a few chords, and I haven’t played regularly since before the move, so I am rusty in the muscles. I am blessed to occasionally be able to write songs in terms of vocal melody + words, but putting chords to it is still a massive challenge to me, and one I have not attempted more than once or twice, ever. Hell, I can’t even get a strum pattern down beyond a simple 1-2-3-4.

So, I lit the candle, pulled up the words, and sang through it a few times, then started fumbling with chords. I didn’t set up formal ritual and invite Nebt-het in, but I made it abundantly clear that She was welcome to sit with me and/or help with the music for Her minisong. Due to several recent silences in response to my invitations, my expectations were low, but to my cautious delight, I got a sense of Her presence fairly quickly.

Nebt-het, to me, is very tall and very slender, with long slim hands that are cool to the touch. Her color is a velvety purple-tinted medium-light grey. She was constantly behind me, slightly to the left, just as She had been when I lit a candle for Her on Her birthday and wrote the minisong in the first place. After working on it for a while, I figured out all the chords and could, stutteringly, play and sing at the same time.

I offered Her more blackberry-grape water when She wanted some; it was what I had given Her on the first night. (The color of that drink, too, became Her color.) The candle burned low and blue as I kept going. Despite the struggle of doing something hard and new, I was gleeful. I was putting music to words and I was the one who wrote the words and I could sing and play and I even had a strum pattern. Holy crap.

I ran out of energy, and my callus-less fingertips were raw; the candle extinguished itself when She said goodnight to me. I told Her I would do better, keep practicing and make it sound better, and She told me that what I had done was enough. Not in the sense of “no, stop here,” but in the sense that what I had done was perfectly sufficient, completely worthy. I tried to wrap my head around that idea when She thanked me for the music, and I thanked Her (about fifty bajillion times) for sitting in with me.

I am going to try to get smooth enough with the chords and strumming to record a version so you can hear, but for now, I wanted to record this experience. Whatever comes of it, I am grateful and happy and blessed.