Grace

My middle name is Grace. It's a beautiful name I have always loved. I'm named after my maternal grandmother who was a wild flapper back in the day and still fun 50 years later when my sister and I came to know her. I love being named after her.

It's a great name, though I've never deeply connected with it. Grace is not a quality I usually associate with my personality. In the wake of the trip to Paris, I'm feeling a kind of internal grace I'm thrilled about, though unfamiliar with.

That thing I always say, Let there be light. Well, the light has arrived, a pearly, graceful light. Every day the light feels better incorporated in my body/being. I'm not as visually glow-y because the light has been sinking in.

The other thing I say, Let it change you. I did! I let Paris change me.

Yesterday I dismantled and decommissioned the space I've used as a shrine. Since I began learning witchcraft back in the 1980s, I've always had a shrine or an alter. It's a wonderful practice. But yesterday I decided that what I need is another bookshelf. All of a sudden I do not feel like I need a shrine. I feel that the shrine is now internal. Likewise my life of the moment - here in the chateau, my work, community and environment - is a sacred landscape, my church you could say. My life is the church and I am the alter. I no longer need to set up a special area in my house to hold my connection to the divine. That's inside me now.

See what I mean when I say I'm feeling the grace of what happened to me? I really am. Wow.