Ostara

The spring equinox, according to my practice, is the celebration of the Goddess as Maiden. Because of this it is an important festival for personal development.

I made a big decision about my work last night to mark the Ostara. It is a decision that is very important and will affect a great deal of my work life for the next few years and beyond into my career. It is also a last chance, so I was quite worried about the choice.

I asked the Goddess to make herself known inside me and aid me in my choice. I repeated to myself over and over that I was making the right choice and that this was a choice for myself and my personal development.

I feel much more confident in my choice than I would if I had not evoked the Goddess to make it. And maybe that confidence is the most important thing to my successful personal development.

March Full Moon

I had a bit of an epiphany today. (Full moons do that sometimes.) I was worrying about a meeting I had with my department head about getting back to work and thinking about the Ostara sabbat that is coming up and suddenly it hit me that my viewpoint when it comes to my work has to change.

I realized that I have to work toward my PhD for one reason and one reason only -- as a journey of personal development. My graduate work must be a way that I work toward incorporating the Maiden aspect of the Goddess into my life. I must work and learn and grow as a scientist because it is what is good --for me. I have to try and let go of everything else -- working for a career in the future, working for money, working for something respectable to do with myself. All of these things are valid reasons, but they cannot be the primary one. My supervisor is not my boss to be appeased, but one of my guides on what is ultimately a personal journey. And each day of the journey needs to be a worthwhile part of the "making of me," not just something to be endured until it is over. And I have to do it because it is a worthwhile way of spending my self-improvement time.

My work has to be my vocation in the truest sense of the word. It is interesting to me that I made my sigil I talked about in the last post using this word. I have carried this sigil around with me since my last post and will continue to do so until all of what I have crafted it for has been fulfilled, but I am sure that today's new ideas were part of what the sigil spell was meant to do for me.

This als0 helps me deal with another concern I have been having -- the guilt of going back to work and leaving the childcare of my son to the rest of my family or some sort of daycare. (It's still to be determined which it will be.) If I see my work as time to work on personal development -- time I feel I need to be a whole person anyway -- I can split my time happily between this and my duties as a Mother. (My Crone aspect has been lacking a bit lately -- I am thinking about how to improve that aspect of myself.)

Ostara is the Spring Equinox coming up in a week or so and is the sabbat celebrating the Maiden aspect of the Goddess. I plan on spending part of that day mulling over which workplace would be best for my personal journey. I think it is a very fitting way to celebrate this festival.

Sigil

I have been continuing to read the book Wicca for Life in which Raymond Buckland discusses the use of sigils. I wasn't familiar with their use and was moderately interested. I found it interesting that the author is quite against ceremonial magick (of the grimoire, conjuring demons kind) since work with sigils reminded me of magick of this sort. For this reason, I looked up sigils on the web to see if sigil use is more related to ceremonial magick or "nature magick". (The two are not hard-and-fast separated, and many practitioners use elements of both. I am more inclined to nature magick.) In the process I sort of accidentally learned more about the use of sigils.

That night, I was exhausted so I went to bed around 9:30pm for a "nap," which turned into the whole night. For several hours I slept fitfully, waking often, and every time I woke I had the word "sigil" in my head, at fever pitch. Finally, after the fifth or sixth time, I said to myself, "All right, I will make a sigil." I slept soundly after that.

So today, I will work on my sigil. I am going to do both a diagramatic one as outlined in the book, and a anagram-style one. It will be about my work situation.

As long as I am open to listening, the gods/my subconscious will tell me what I need to do.