Eggs and shells and breaking through
It’s Spring in the North, and like young plants just poking through the soil, many who have isolated all year are peeking outside. Is it safe to venture out? Perhaps you feel the push-pull of longing for hugs and community, and fear of leaving the egg of safety that you wove around you and your home.
Even essential or frontline workers, whose sustenance through the year relied on interacting with others, wove an egg of safety around their body as they moved about.
In a Reclaiming Tradition ritual last week, we contemplated our (egg)shells and our fears and hopes around leaving it.
I got my second shot this week—yeah!—but my fears came more to the fore. How soon would I go to an in-person gathering? have people in my home? sit at a restaurant?
Will the many connections I’ve made with the wider Reclaiming community (my spiritual tradition) fade as people move back to in-person rituals and events?
Stoking my fire
We Reclaiming Tradition Witches have perfected the art of online rituals, an interesting gift of this pandemic year. Several rituals in the past month focused on our inner fires. I’ve adopted the practice of tending my fires in my (somewhat) daily practice.
I sense how my flame burns and assure it access to boundless Earth and Star energy, to the elements, clearing any detritus (including fear, worry) that I brush away as ash. I’m working with triple fires in my body. You might find a different way to work—ask to know how you hold your fire.
First, I assure my three flames flare so that I feel my passion, my purpose, my path. I bask in this energy and it brings me back to my centered self. I move and dance with the energy, using my voice as well: however my fires move me. While this can be a quiet meditation, it fits my style to push the practice through my whole being in a way that I can’t be still. Make this an embodied practice!
When I feel ready, I set the flames to a sustainable level and go about my day.
Fire in my egg
And so my egg transforms into energy—my delicious energy. Rather than an egg with a shell, permeable or cracked as it may be, I am egg-shaped energy that protects me and dispels my worries about the future.
Perhaps you will find my practice adaptable to your needs and useful for moving about in the world.
By the way, the featured photo? Peels from clementines that dry into flower shapes. I stack them to look like a fire. Bonus: they scent the air.