Things you make. Things you see. Awen. Inspiration.

Today in the parking lot of my office building, I saw something that reminded me of how amazing the world is. It's no wonder that crows and ravens have long been considered the messengers of gods, they are so smart and so creative.

This particular crow had found a treasure: A mini-bar sized bottle of Dr. McGillicuddy's mint liqueur. He'd somehow managed to lever that unopened bottle halfway up a tree and was sitting there, in full view of myself and my coworkers, totally unperturbed by our observation, trying with beak and claws to get that bottle open.

I'm not a Heathen, but in that moment I could not help but think Odin would be proud.

Speaking of all things Northern. I made myself a starter set of runes. I've been reading tarot for years and it works more and less well depending on the day and my state of mind. I'd like to learn to divine with something more abstract than tarot and with less garbled history than tarot, which draws influence from here, there, and everywhere. I looked at Ogham too, but I'm going to start with Runes because it's been more easy for me to find information and established systems to use. Ogham seems to be more specialized, less common, and more fragmented and I don't have the money to buy books just now.

And lastly, on the subject of things I make. I made these sets of prayer beads, which I'm hoping to use for my meditation practice for the DP. I just have to buckled down and write myself some prayers to go with it. When I was briefly Catholic I found the rosary to be really effective at focusing me and it let me achieve sustained and regular meditation more reliably than any other method I've tried. I'm hoping that a bead prayer/meditation will be just as effective for me when I'm directing it toward Nemetona and not Mary.

Photo by CarysBirch

The turquoise colored set are ceramic and wooden beads, in 4 sets of 6 (no specific significance to the numbers, it was a broken necklace and that's how many beads I had.) The second set is aventurine and white quartz, and it's arranged in three groups of three, with an extra bead to start and end on.

These are my inspirations for today.