Pending Ordination
With March around the corner, now is the time when my coven starts to focus on Ordinations. It's always a joyous time of year, though it's also the busiest. Between February and March, many of us are lucky to get even 1 day off from having to do a thing. Most of us maintain day jobs, several of us have families, and we all have lots of planning and coordinating around PantheaCon and then Ordination Retreat - not to mention our social lives. So, now that PantheaCon is done and over with, the focus shifts to the next thing.
In less than a week, the Wildflowers will be ordaining a hive of one - something that's never happened before. The new Initiates spend their year getting to know the community on a deeper level, fully exploring if they want to be in our inner sanctum, and if they really want to be doing the work alongside us. While this is a deeply personal journey, it's also a deeply rewarding one. We find out things about ourselves that we wouldn't have otherwise known.
I met Akasha when she was an aspirant in the coven, taking the first year classes that prep people for the path of Initiation. She has children of a similar age to my own, and one can never have enough mommy-friends. The unexpected thing was bonding with her so intimately that we regularly find each other at the exact moment we start thinking of the other. It's fabulous (sometimes a little shocking). This bond has also allowed me to witness her growth in such a way that still astonishes me. I'm so proud of the work she has accomplished, and the work that she's bound to achieve.
On the flip side of all of this is me coming up on my own Ordination as a Mother of the New Time (formerly known as Bloodroot Honey Priestess). I'm having all of the same nerves that I did the first time around, though I know that there's nothing to be afraid of. I'm also experiencing friends and other clergy members coming up to me exclaiming how proud they are of my own growth. It's weird. I know that I've grown a lot in this past year - I wouldn't be ready to ordain if I hadn't - it's just odd to have people so warmly tell me so.
All of this emotion though - me proud for my initiate friend, while receiving pride for my initiating self - has me feeling like I'm operating on two sides of the same coin, spinning endlessly in the vastness of space and time. It's all so real, and it's all happening so fast. I honestly wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. However, knowing that the culmination of all of this hard work is literally 5 days away has me feeling like I'm staring into the void, awaiting my fate - but still knowing that I'm going to live, and everything is going to be okay.
It's true that I might not survive this next test of fate, but I'm saying "bring it on' anyways.