Senut at the bookshelf, with citations
My shrine is a bookshelf with little cabinet doors, and every weekday morning it opens like a tiny shop. Wash hands and face, light a battery tealight (I work in an archive, real flame near paper makes me itch), and offer cool water and a slice of bread to Bast and Djehuty. I greet them in clumsy Middle Egyptian, then in English, because I'm fairly sure they prefer sincerity to grammar.
After ten minutes I revert the offerings, which just means I thank them and eat the bread myself. Nothing is wasted in this house. Bast gets first look at the sardines on Fridays; the cat gets the sardines.
Fifteen minutes a day. It has kept me steady through two job changes and one very long winter.
Last Sunday my eight-year-old watched me pour mead on the offering stump and asked, very reasonably, why we give good mead to nobody.
I told her it isn't nobody. It's the land-wights, the ancestors, the gods, depending on the day. But mostly I told her about gifts. The Hávamál says a gift always looks for a gift in return. Our whole way is built on that: you give, they give, you give again, and over the years it becomes a friendship.
She thought about it, then poured a little of her apple juice next to the mead. 'In case the small ones don't like alcohol.'
Fifteen years I've been doing this and it never once occurred to me to offer the small ones juice. We do now.
Fresh sakaki on the fifteenth
The 1st and 15th are when I change the sakaki on my kamidana. In Nagano my grandmother cut it from the bush behind the house. In Seattle I drive to a grocery in the International District that gets it maybe half the time, and the rest of the time I ask the neighbour's camellia hedge to stand in, very politely.
This morning: rice, salt, water and a little sake in their white dishes. Two bows, two claps, one bow. Rain loud on the skylight, the cat sitting under the shelf like a small guardian.
It isn't a big ceremony. It's more like opening the window in a room you love.
The community orchard had its last picking day on Sunday. When everyone had gone home with their bags of apples, I stayed behind with the old Bramley in the corner, the one that leans like she's listening.
Poured a cup of last year's cider around her roots and thanked her for the crop and for shading the picnic table all summer. Left the highest apples for the blackbirds, and for the fieldfares when they arrive. Then I sat with my back against her trunk for a while and watched the light go gold.
Wassailing is in January, but I don't think trees mind being thanked off schedule.
The twins have decided they're in charge of the home altar now. This morning each of them offered an orange to Amitabha, rang the little bell much harder than necessary, and bowed. Minh bowed so enthusiastically he bonked his forehead on the shelf, then looked up at the Buddha very seriously and said, 'That was a really big bow.'
We chanted Nam Mô A Di Đà Phật ten times, then had the oranges for breakfast. Some days practice looks like a candlelit temple. Most days it looks like this, and I wouldn't trade it.
Karkade for Bast
Karkade is hibiscus tea, and in Egypt it's everywhere, cold in summer and hot in winter. I cold-steep mine: a big handful of dried hibiscus in a jug of water in the fridge overnight, then a spoonful of honey stirred in the next morning. It comes out the deepest garnet, which feels right for a lioness.
The first small glass goes on the shrine for Bast, who receives it with what I imagine is polite feline indifference. I drink the rest over the week. My partner calls it "goddess juice" and steals it constantly.
(Footnote, because I can't help myself: I don't claim this as reconstruction. It's a modern Egyptian drink and a modern devotion, and I think she's fine with that.)