Omen Days [ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5-6 | 7-9 | 10-11 | 12-13 ]
The source of my omen for Day 12 is you, my readers. In your continued re-reading of my April 2017 post on the Grail Cross (and your silence in response to my requests for feedback!), I find a useful omen for our days ahead: we need both Grail and Cross energies. In the absence of your reasons, I can only supply my own, and that is as it should be.
The Grail Cross is a union of symbols, a conjunction of two traditions, yes — but both celebrating and indicating things much larger than human tradition: the divine not just accessible in nature, right here where we live, here in the flesh, but the same thing, on a different arm of the spiral. If I’m not feeling it, and knowing it, that’s something I can change. How you and I change it will shape much of our experience in this new year. Not politicians, not employers, not partners or celebrities — give away my power to them and they can’t — even with the most loving of intentions — give me what I need, what the world needs. Rightly understood and calibrated, these two needs are one, even as Grail and Cross are a union. Immanent and transcendent, if you need or want those words.
In the Tarot reading in the previous post, the cards for “recent past” and “possible outcome” are both Cups, or Grails. The moon is the Self or significator. Do I really need clearer pointers?
Well, maybe I do. I don’t know about you, but I can be notoriously thick, and slow to understand even when signs, spirits, gods and the weather all point in the same direction. So I look for the final omen of these Omen Days, number 13, on January 6.
sauna photo courtesy BW.
My friend B invites me to share his recently-constructed sauna on Twelfth Night (or Thirteenth Night, in terms of the omens I’ve been taking for this series). We thaw and warm and relax in the cedar space, alternating with brief stands in the evening snow outside, watching the moon that’s full today, feeling our sweat dry, returning when the wind bites cold on our heated bodies.
sauna photo courtesy BW
In this dim, round, warm, womb-like space, we sit and sweat and talk. B has added a few things not shown in this second picture: a tomten stone at the foot of the stove, in honor of the local land spirits, a thermometer near the top of the round interior, a small venting hole and cover to help regulate the temperatures. For most of our hour in and intermittently outside the sauna, the temps hover around 200-210 F / 93-99 C — blissful, exquisite heat, in which the body yields, sweats, unknots, and finally reacquaints itself with what the Finns call löyly — the sauna steam as a celebration of all the elements together, working in concert: fire in the stove, earth in the rocks above it, water ladled from a sauna bucket onto the rocks for the final steam bath, and the steamy air that rises from them. (B is meditatively carving a sauna ladle from cherry wood he found as windfall on his land.)
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A Druid Way 