My morning coffee ritual is basically a sumbel, since I make toasts. But after each toast, I listen to see if the gods have any messages for me.I toast Odin, Honir, Lodhur Who Is Loki, and Thor. In the afternoon, I toast the goddesses with tea. I might make a toast with a more traditional beverage from time to time as well. At any time, whether I'm specially listening or not, I might receive a message from my gods. This has been happening since I wrote the unpublishable novel Some Say Fire, and in the process of writing learned to hear the gods, as I detailed in some previous posts. Here on Gnosis Diary, I talk about my gnosis a lot, unsurprisingly. Here are some of my recent gnosis experiences.

My gods very rarely tell me not to do something. As I mentioned years ago, when I was writing the post that eventually became Good Knowledge, Bad Teacher, my computer repeatedly glitched until I took it for a sign and changed my focus. After that I asked the gods to please just tell me when they want me to do or not do something. A few years ago I blogged about when Loki told me not to go spread anarchy in the desert, and I found out later that night someone had stolen the idol of Sekhmet from her temple and the angry goddess was walking the desert right then. (Eventually the temple got a new statue. But the temple was never the same after that and there was a schism in the local pagan community that I blogged about in my post Rebuttal of TERF Values.)

In early spring of this year, my gods once again told me to stay home when I had been planning to go somewhere. This time it was Odin, although Loki also spoke up in support of what he had said. 

What led up to this was that this winter I fell and hurt my ankle, and I wanted to go swimming not only for the usual reasons (swimming is my best pain relief for my other old injuries and arthritis, in addition to being good exercise) but also to help recondition and rehab the ankle injury. I was planning to go to a local gym, which I had signed up for through my health insurance, and that morning I had packed a gym bag and gotten dressed when Odin told me not to go. I was ready, and it had taken me weeks to work up to being able to drive long enough to get to the gym (driving really hurts my ankle), and over the winter not being able to swim or exercise my pain level had gone up, my abilities had gone down, my weight was up, and I was ready to do something to fix it, so I was inclined to be grumpy about it. 

So, Odin and Loki told me why. Obviously if I was swimming I would not be able to mask.  I mask in any large public building like a grocery store or doctor's office. Odin told me if I went to that gym that day he would not be able to keep me safe and I would catch Covid again. Even though I just had it a year ago. So I stayed home. And I thanked Odin for keeping me safe. Not long after, the weather warmed up enough for me to heat up my outdoor pool and swim in the safety of the air of my own back yard.

I asked Odin what would like for himself, and he said a bottle of mead. So I bought one and we had a toast. 

xxx

I love my gods. I tell them so, from time to time, when I happen to think of it. I am not sure, in the 100k+ words I've written on this blog, whether I've ever said so here or not. It's such a simple thing I may have missed mentioning it, while trying to describe complex things. I'm not sure I've ever told another human that I love my gods. But I do tell them. So, now I have written it here.