Fate Fire: Making Art for Making Choices

Last updated on: July 17, 2013 at 1:26 pm by Melissa Hill

Fate Fire: Making Art for Making Choices 2013-07-17T13:26:00-04:00 Melissa Hill

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One thing you can count on is change. It is one of the essential mysteries of ecology. Energy cycles from one form to another as plants harvest sunlight and animals harvest plants and each other. On the other end of the cycle there are the decomposers, those dark creatures of the forest duff who create the rich soil from which the acorn sprouts.

Change y to us as individuals as well, in different ways as we walk the complex dance of society and culture. We are not immune to the cycles of ecology, this is simply another layer, increasing complexity and depth that we explore.

Change is one of the sacred mysteries. Unfathomable and it comes for us all.

We all deal with it in different ways. I built a fire and wove a web in it. This is a picture just before it burned:

Fate Fire

Our memories are filled with moments of change. The stories that we create with those memories are filtered through the lens of change, altering over time to suit our created ideas of self and our values.

So what happens in life when you reach a point where you’re not sure what to do next? I often imagine my life as a literal journey. I see it as a woods that I walk through. My fate or choices are a dirt path sometimes worn and wide, sometimes hard to see. The trees often block the future from me. At times my vision is obscured in my imaginary world and in my real life. The trees get thick and there are too many branching paths to choose from. How do we choose when there’s too many choices?

Let me wander down a tangential path for a moment. The Ogham is the Gaelic alphabet, represented by cross hatches on a line. In this instance I am pondering the letter “Quert” the “Q” sound which was added so that the Gaelic alphabet could translate the sounds of far away Greece. In modern interpretations it is seen as connected to the apple tree and in divination it means multiple positive choices. I’ve been pulling Quert a lot in the last six months.

Some people might write pro and con lists, consult friends or just do what seems right.

Some of us consult our gods.

I’m in a Quert kind of place right now. So many good things and I’m searching for a way to pull all my interests into one path I can walk. I am an artist. I am a druid. I am a farmer, a wife, mother, lover, and friend. That’s a lot to do!

So a few of the members of my grove and I did a rite to honor the fate goddess. We gave her offerings of hand spun yarn, hand made items and linden wood. We asked for a vision and we got one.

Rainbows of diversity are what we found when we compared our silent experiences. We were told that every person and every color is important. Others were shown that the world is spinning and that spinning is connected to fate as well. In the end all she could promise us was that the world would keep spinning for us. Eventually even that would change, but for us it would not.

It was with a serious tone that we ended our ceremony, but not without hope. I still don’t know exactly how I’m going to find the perfect balance of all the threads of my life but I’m working on it.

So how do you find your path? What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

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