Thursday, September 26, 2013

Thankful Thursday

This week I am thankful for...

  1. The love and support from friends and family during a time of grief
  2. The ability to laugh at life
  3. Hugs
  4. The cooling weather
  5. Events that make you look at life through a different perspective.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Correspondences

Regarding Correspondences

I was recently researching different deities and one of the items I've looked up is the various correspondences that are said to be associated with a particular deity.  As usual most sites on the internet regurgitate the same information over and over again, many simply a copy/paste of work found elsewhere with a different background and some pretty pictures added.  In this particular instance I was looking up an Egyptian deity and one of the correspondences claimed to be associated with him regarding crystals and gemstones was Opal.  This threw me because despite a couple of brief references to opals in Greek and Roman literature I can find no evidence of opals existing in Ancient Egypt.  Even the references I've tracked down could relate to fluorite as much as opal.  I could be completely wrong but it definitely got me thinking about the correspondences that we accept as assigned to particular deities and where this information came from.

Some correspondences are easy, mythology and pictorial representations give us the various colors, animals, symbols etc that we assign to certain deities.  But then we seem to need to give flowers and fragrances and foods and days of the week etc and I start wondering where all this comes from.  I'm sorry the historian in me just finds it hard to believe that we can say that all these deities have these correspondences.  The best we can do is say, okay - this deity is a moon deity, associations with the moon also include x, x and x so we could essentially associate this with said deity in theory.  Which is fine, but specify that, I think a lot of people are under some illusion that this information exists for each and every deity and it doesn't, plus there is just a significant lack of resource acknowledgement in these areas to begin with.


Monday, September 23, 2013

Musing Monday

Today my mind is on friends, family and loved ones.  With the sad and completely unnecessary death of a friend over the weekend I have been pondering a lot about several issues.  The obvious is of course keeping those you love close, making sure you connect and just being thankful for all the people in your life.  I'm a crappy friend when it comes to keeping in touch regularly but I often think of those people who have touched my life and I know I should be working harder at staying in touch.  Secondly, I've been wondering if it is a cultural/generational thing that could possibly have someone believe at the age of 19 that since life is awesome right now it should be ended so you never experience when it might get worse.  Maybe it is just that one person.  I can't wrap my head around it.  I've always believed that life is to be lived.  Don't get me wrong I've had some very low moments when suicide seemed like the only option but something inside me always spoke up at just the right time telling me that doing so was letting the bad things win.  I can't imagine waking up one morning and thinking life is great so lets stop now.

Of course a focus on death over the weekend has driven home what I've known for a while in that I need to live my life more.  Now that school is done and I have spare time I should be doing more, not necessarily out and about (I'm an introvert) but even just doing those things I love, being crafty, reading, writing, exploring nature etc.  Ironically this weekend hubby had actually arranged Friday and Saturday off so that we could do just that when we got the news Friday early afternoon all those plans went out the window.