Creating New Images and a Slow Weekend

Saturday dawned bright and beautiful. After my morning routine, I took out some blank popsicle sticks and Micron pens to make some God-sticks.

Often, while observing the auspicious offering days in the lunar calendar, I have noted to myself which Gods are not represented with God-sticks, but I seldom make new ones. The procrastination weight was heavy, and finally, I added it to my to-do list this week to get these done for Astraia, Mnemosyne, the Kharites, the Moirai, Horkos, Eris, Iris, Tykhe, Nyx, and the Horai.

My partner usually comes up for the weekend, unless the weather is rough (which it may be on Monday, the day she drives back). The God-sticks, alongside a plethora of “life upkeep” tasks that have little to do with religion — the kinds of things that pile up when one works a 9-5 — suddenly became tasks slated for this weekend.

For practical purposes, the way I make God-sticks is this: To reduce the likelihood of spelling mistakes, I copy the Greek from the Theoi website for the Gods I want to include in the round of practical agalmata creation. I go to a word processor and use change case to make it uppercase and pray that Theoi dot com is worthy of the significant orthographic and proper unicode encoding trust I have placed in it. I use the rendered uppercase as the reference point when I write out the names in pencil and consider embellishments, and I go over my initial draft with Micron pens, let them rest for a few minutes, and go over the finished stick with an eraser to catch any stray bits of pencil.

As I’m taking Twitter breaks every weekend (which, this week, includes the holiday on Monday), time felt even more luxurious and expansive. I made a delicious rice bowl for lunch. Nothing felt rushed.

In the late afternoon, after taking care of the life upkeep stuff, I used some of the Notion templates from Rowena Tsai (a YouTuber I watch) to check in on my 2022 goals now that we’re two weeks into the year. One thing I realized while watching a video she released on fixed vs. growth mindsets is that the thing I tell myself very often — good thing I’m prioritizing the hieratic because I don’t know if I’m intelligent enough for its complement — whenever I read something that I don’t understand on the very first try is, in fact, a fixed mindset belief, not just a cute thing I silently joke about to manage my expectations. I have read and heard so much about fixed vs. growth mindset (it’s positive psychology water, isn’t it?), but something about Rowena walking through a template with tables hit me differently. For dinner, I tried out a fun YouTube recipe for pan-fried rice paper parcels, and I ate that while reading excerpts about the Forms with renewed energy. With that monster slain, I might even reconcile with mathematics. Why not?

And, of course, to-do items being the way they are, the fact that I finished this batch of God-sticks uncovered a new set of future to-do items I judged important for streamlining my ritual routines: verses to use in liturgical contexts, poems, and prayers. There is always something just over the horizon.

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