Presences

As an effect of my student-hood for my tradition, I have become more aware of the presence of spiritual forces around me in my everyday life. Nothing that I have experienced thus far has been anywhere close to the intensity with which I feel this presence at times. It's like a surge of caffeine/adrenaline that pumps through my limbs, making me feel like with just a little effort I could step into the sky. Unlike caffeine and adrenaline, however, I don't crash afterward. I find myself completely aware of every contraction of every muscle as I am walking around campus doing my job, and instead of feeling tired after lugging my load of books around, I feel exhilarated and energized, excited and maybe a little crazed about the thought of doing it again. I have also been having weirdly aggressive/protective thoughts lately. Like, I want to protect my family from physical harm, and when it comes down to it, my first instinctual reaction is more often fight instead of flight.

These are another reason that I find myself exercising more than before. The feeling of exertion and the sheer physicality of it is amazing, and I find myself having to force myself to quit to avoid injury toward the end of the workout.

I can only think that this is the influence of some divine masculine force. The call of the male archetype has never been very strong for me, though it was less foreign than the female archetype. As I progress into my young adulthood, I find myself more and more often identifying with warriors in the stories that I read, because deep down I know that I share that same drive, that same sense of protective duty.

I have tentatively identified this source as the God of the sun, a force that I have worked with before but not one that I have actively identified with. I was much more of a Nature/Storm God person myself, though that may have something to do with a father-archetype protector-of-my-person thing than actual identity. The reason that I have made the connection with the sun is that the feelings are at their strongest when I am out under the sun. I can feel it over the course of the first moments whenever I walk out into the sun; the power and sense of excitement pervade my every fiber, and there are times that I even feel my perceptions shifting subtly. My eyesight gets sharper, feelings intensify, my sense of smell even gets better. These sensations, I feel, are the senses of the divine warrior, tuning my sense to a more advantageous level.

Because of these feelings and my new found energy, I have decided that exercising is going to be a devotional time to this new feeling, exploring it and my relationship to the god that brings it. Maybe I will look more into Lugh. He fits the pantheon I feel drawn to, is the sun, a great warrior, and is commonly identified with the Gaulic Lugus, whose iconography included ravens, among other things. Yes, this is a stretch, but maybe this is a sign that I need to expand my pantheon. Lots of questions to answer. Lots of soul searching to do. Lots of miles to run. Until next time, guys.