This week a friend asked me if there was anything I wanted to ask over her morning coffee with Odin.  There are points in my life where I ask others, because even as someone who has developed the set of skills needed to listen to the Gods I still have moments of discernment voids.  The answer to my question was Focus on yourself.

This is the message I’ve been getting for 6 months now, and it comes back to me each time a little less patient.  This isn’t the answer I want, and until recently I fought it a little more than I probably should have.  I’m a mother.  I’m a teacher.  I’m a wife.  I’m a woman, which more often than not means society places the role of caretaker upon me.  And most days I’m entirely content to be one.

Focusing on myself isn’t something I have a lot of time for.

Focusing on myself isn’t something I’m comfortable doing, because focusing on myself means that I have to actually sit in deep silence and examine the dark things lurking in the shadows, or to be honest I have to force myself to just do the daily crap I don’t want to do…  Which that alone probably has some sort of ugliness attached to it lurking in a corner some where.

But this command has more meaning than that.  I’ve been pushing hard to try to work within the confines of what I think I should be doing and what I know is needed in the communities I’m in…  And at the end of the day, I find myself wondering how long I can keep up with that before I burn myself out on it.

We return, yet again to the Delphic Maxim of Know Thyself…  

Instead of writing, I’ve been playing with metal.  The pendant above is a piece I made this afternoon in sterling silver.  I keep eyeing it, trying to decide if I’m going to keep it or sell it…  I don’t see myself as particularly Heathen, but I do at the same time anymore.

I’ve been doing much research on who my Ancestors were and where they’ve come from.  The answer to this question is that I’m more English than I would have ever thought possible, but also that all German ancestry goes back to the Rhineland (unless it actually goes back to Norway, which is another can of worms that I’m just not ready to open)…

Which a few of you out there know is where the scholarly side of my interest has fallen in the last 6 months or so, and to be honest I’m sad I didn’t know enough about it years ago when people told me I had to focus on one cultural tradition over the other.  That’s not how history worked.

Things happen for a reason.  Blood calls to blood.  These are 2 things I hold as truths.

So I’m about.  I am as well as to be expected.  I am getting ready in the fall months to take my grandmother around the Missouri River Valley to visit the graves of our Ancestors that she’s never had a chance to visit, and trying to rally up some interest in trying to get someone to take care of an orphan cemetery that holds the bodies of Civil War veterans and their kin.  I am making jewelry, because I’m finally at a place in my life where I can it again.

I’m focusing on myself.  Because if Odin has to tell me one more time to worry about myself, I have a feeling it will come in the form of physically manifesting to hit me over the head with something or possibly a natural disaster.  I’d rather avoid that.