Before and After: A Comparison on Being God Bothered

I originally wrote this for the Gods’ Mouths Project. I’m not sure if this project is still running, but I felt that this post could still be useful for my readers.

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Once upon a time I was not god bothered. My god phone was, for all intents and purposes, shut off. There was a time when I only checked in with my trapped astral self once every few weeks or so.

There was a time when I wasn’t living all these lives at once. There was a time when I was more “normal”.

That time is gone.

Back before this roller coaster started, my day started like most- the alarm clock would go off at 6. I’d hit snooze until about 6:30 when my partner and I would finally get up and rush to get ready to head off to work. We’d spend all day at work, doing our thing. Same ol’ same ol’. And then we’d go home and eat dinner and spend the rest of the night talking, surfing the internet or playing video games. On more special days, we’d go out and do stuff. It was the typical life and my religious life didn’t really factor into anything- it was more or less non-existent.

But then my brain broke open and things changed.

Telephone Keypad by Chris Campbell via Flickr

Now, my day is supposed to start at 7, but it usually starts before that. You see, my partner gets up at 5:30 and in the midst of being half awake and half asleep, I end up sometimes astral tripping for a while. I get caught up in conversations with my astral partners, or I find myself sitting at some table talking to someone I don’t even know (I wander while I’m asleep sometimes). Sometimes I wake up tied to a chair. Other times I wake up with my family in bed.

But it almost always happens before the alarm clock goes off. It’s just an ideal mindset for traveling- half awake and half asleep. I often accidentally fall into it,and end up staying there instead of falling back asleep.

For the good days, I will drag myself out of bed at 7. For the bad days, it can be closer to 7:30. I am constantly fatigued and tired, so its a chore to get out of bed. Once I’m up, I head to my computer and turn it on. As a means of being more attentive with my shrine, my kar shrine now lives on my desk, and when I sit down at the computer in the morning, I open it up as a way to bring the gods more into my day to day stuff.

And the fun begins.

I try to leave before 8:30. I will spend this hour to an hour and a half trying to check all of my feed on Tumblr and other forums. In between this, I will try to eat, pack a lunch, and check in with any astral crap that may have happened over night. Sometimes it’s a quick check and I manage to get everything done. Many days I forgo eating for getting the other “more important” things done.

I walk to work. Usually while walking I get sucked out into dancing with one of my astral companions. It’s something I can’t help. If the song has a beat, I inevitably end up on a dance floor with him. Once I get to work, I will spend my day trying to stay on task. But in btwn projects I will work on WP posts, astral and dream logs (which can run into the 10K word count range) and keep an eye on all of the social media I participate in – just in case anything important is going on there. Plus, if there are any astral pictures I need to jot down for my logs, that has to be done before I leave work- as my computer at home can’t hack it.

Sometimes its a quiet day and I’m able to focus more on my job and more on my work. Other days shit hits fan on the Otherside. Gods get in my ears and tell me that X needs to be done now. Or the writing bug will show up and I end up typing into WP for a few hours because the perfect string of words happened into my head.

Sometimes I feel cut off from things and I’ll stare at an open Photoshop canvas for hours waiting for something to inspire me. Sometimes I’ll do the same with my WP editor. It really depends.

This whole broke open head thing – it’s fickle. You can never tell whether its going to be a “I can’t hear myself think” or a “I can hear crickets in my head” day.

Once my 8 hours of servitude are up, I walk home, doing the same thing that I did on the way to work- dancing and astral stuff. I go home and work on getting something in my stomach. I maintain my house chores as a means to keep my sanity. And then I sit right back down to the computer and continue to read and write and discuss until I can’t keep my eyes open longer. On busy nights, I go between this and laying down and astral tripping for a while- because the astral is a honey badger, and sometimes I need to lay down and focus on what I’m doing, lest I screw up.

And once I decide I need to sleep, I lay down and sometimes I pass right out. Other times I end up at the River with Osiris, or sitting across from Set’s desk for more work. Or I will get into a conversation with one of my partners and end up staying awake for another hour or two to handle those sorts of things. It’s just how it goes. Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and end up staying awake for the same reasons.

I’m sure to the outside viewer this doesn’t seem like much. I’m not spending a lot of time in front of a shrine, but I am doing devotional work. Maintaining a regular blog takes time, and writing these posts can take days for me. I have a list of ideas that I keep with me at all times- so that I can add to it if something strikes me. Even when I decide to ‘take a break’ and watch a movie or some tv- I end up focusing right back on my Kemetic practice.

Indirectly, everything comes back to Kemeticism. And when I stop paying attention to my practice- to my community, to be more specific, the gods show back up to remind me where my place is.

It wasn’t until recently that I realized how much of a toll this type of life takes on you and your relations. I live my life to do this. That means my time is very limited to do anything else. My focus can wander away for a little while, but it will always end right back up onto this path. It makes it hard for me to sit down and enjoy anything for long, because I get itchy hands and an itchy brain. It always comes back to this work.

It effects my relations because sometimes there just isn’t enough of me to go around. My physical partner understands that I have an astral life to maintain as well as a community to work on. My astral partners get that I have a life here and a 40 hour job I need to keep up with. In the end, being with me means that you’ve got to make sacrifices. Even my job can suffer when I’ve had to stay up all night handling business, or someone decides they need my attention while working on a project with a tight deadline.

In order to survive with the hole in my head, I’ve had to learn a lot about prioritizing and cutting away stuff I don’t need. I don’t go out much, because it eats up spoons. If it eats up spoons, I can’t get my astral work done or write about things. I’ve had to learn how to balance multiple relationships across multiple planes. I’ve had to figure out how to balance my family life there and spending time with my partner here. It’s been a huge lesson in give and take, and its a lesson that I’ve failed many many times, and will likely fail many times again before this is all said and done.

Above all, I think that becoming someone who is ‘god-bothered’ has taught me about juggling and prioritizing. Once your head has been broken open, there is no way to go back. Once the gods have decided that they want to stick their fingers in your proverbial pie, there is no way to go back to the way it was before. For me, the longer I’ve worked with Unseen entities, the more entities I’ve collected, and the more impact they’ve had on how I live and how I operate on a day to day basis. Because of this, I’ve really had to figure out what is most important for me and how to work within the parameters that they make for me. It’s not been easy, but it certainly has taught me a lot about my limits and what I’m capable of.

I may never be able to go back to the way life was before, but I can certainly learn to make the most out of what I have going now.