{"id":199,"date":"2011-11-26T09:51:16","date_gmt":"2011-11-26T15:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unorthodoxcreativity.com\/emky\/?p=199"},"modified":"2012-05-24T09:51:48","modified_gmt":"2012-05-24T14:51:48","slug":"serving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/unorthodoxcreativity.com\/emky\/magic\/serving\/","title":{"rendered":"serving"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just about everyone seems to have dry spells, periods where they have trouble being as immersed in their spirituality as they&#8217;d like. Whether it comes about from major life changes, a hectic day-to-day routine, a bout of depression or anxiety or other emotional crash, or just entirely randomly, I&#8217;ve heard so many people refer to it happening that I can&#8217;t say I feel alone when it hits me.<\/p>\n<p>I lit a candle for Nebt-het today and poured Her Her favorite-so-far drink, and I sat before my shrine and played guitar for Her. I wanted&#8211; really, intensely wanted&#8211; to feel Her presence as I had before, a tall slender woman in violet-grey with long, cool fingers.<\/p>\n<p>But my head was cloudy, and while I felt strangely certain She was around, I couldn&#8217;t for the life of me actually pick up on Her presence with my senses as I normally could. It was hard for me to focus, though I tried.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, I wrote in my prayerbook and prayed over it, sending my words and hopes to Netjer on behalf of other people.<\/p>\n<p>And I want to find other ways I can serve&#8211; serve Her, my Mother, serve Netjer, uphold ma&#8217;at. I will donate money to causes where I can, I will spread the word when I can, but that feels like the very least I can do, not something that&#8217;s really done out of service to Netjer. I want to think about what else I can do, in terms of a short-notice not-formal-volunteering thing. Putting in time at the local shelter or soup kitchen is a wonderful thing, but not something that can be done spontaneously at 11h30 at night, you know?<\/p>\n<p>Is posting on the forums and welcoming my siblings in Kemetic Orthodoxy a service to Netjer? Is praying for the sick, the injured, the passed a service in my Mother&#8217;s name, She who is guide to the newly dead and comfort to those grieving? Does it really matter and have an impact when I do these tiny, intangible things? Am I really making the world better, even in the smallest possible way, or am I taking a token action only to make myself feel like I am?<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know the answer. I might never know. But I want to find concretely Good Things to do when I feel the need to offer some part of my time and energy to the world in gratitude for being alive in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just about everyone seems to have dry spells, periods where they have trouble being as immersed in their spirituality as they&#8217;d like. Whether it comes about from major life changes, a hectic day-to-day routine, a bout of depression or anxiety or other emotional crash, or just entirely randomly, I&#8217;ve heard so many people refer to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[14,22],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/unorthodoxcreativity.com\/emky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/unorthodoxcreativity.com\/emky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/unorthodoxcreativity.com\/emky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/unorthodoxcreativity.com\/emky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/unorthodoxcreativity.com\/emky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/unorthodoxcreativity.com\/emky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":200,"href":"http:\/\/unorthodoxcreativity.com\/emky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions\/200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/unorthodoxcreativity.com\/emky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/unorthodoxcreativity.com\/emky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/unorthodoxcreativity.com\/emky\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}