Today, for the first time in a long while, I knelt at my shrine and felt around for the faux velvet bag that keeps the prayer beads I purchased for Hermes five and a half years ago. They are made of bright metal and white-gray spiderweb jasper, and I bought them on Etsy a bit before I realized just how tangled-up in modern slavery and worker abuse the mining industry is — now I prefer glass beads (from the same store). The beads came with a prayer that I modified fairly quickly.
A wave of nostalgia hit me because I remembered the headspace I was in back then. When I flew to conferences, I would have them on the plane with me to pray because takeoff always made me nervous, especially the time when I went to a conference in Québec on a tiny plane that literally had a back seat like a schoolbus. I don’t drive and, at the time, I was extremely nervous in cars. I would also recite the bead-count to calm me down when I was a passenger, either before leaving home with the beads or silently while trying not to look out the window without the beads. (I am less nervous now because I meditate regularly. I also have much more clarity about what makes me anxious.) So, for a long time, I used these prayer beads kind of like a security blanket or a hug. That might sound a tad superstitious, but it’s where I was at, and I hope the God understands.
I stopped reciting the prayer on them quite so often a few years ago — from every day to Saturdays, a day of the week I picked because it’s the day I usually run errands, and the context seemed appropriate — and then I switched to praying to Hermes via his Orphic Hymn. This morning, I looked down and thought, Oh, I haven’t done that in a while, once I finished prayers to Polymnia, Eir, and Apollon. My first instinct had been to do more prayers to Apollon before the thought occurred to me. Somehow, I always end up praying to Hermes in a lengthy way when I’m getting hungry. It’s very Homeric Hymn 4.
Reaching back for well-worn roads is something that has been a theme over the past few days. Yesterday, I traded the prayer I had been reciting for Apollon for the one I had offered several years ago. And — while the chant I started giving the household Gods is new, the idea of singing or chanting is something that dates back to my memories of the drum circles after ritual when I was a preteen and teenager, back when everyone got together to sing chants. It feels like an entire lifetime ago because it was the early 2000s, but I still remember the scent of bonfire smoke in my hair.
KALLISTI 