The path
Devotion without a performance review
Returning is the practice. Fireworks are optional and slightly suspicious.
Devotion is not a mood and not a personality type. It is the decision to address something — a god, the land, the dead who earned it, your own future self — more than once, in words you are willing to repeat when you are tired.
You do not have to be certain the addressee exists in the way a historian would accept. You do have to be honest about the kind of claim you are making. “I speak to Aphrodite as a poet speaks” is a complete theology. “Aphrodite owes me a boyfriend by Friday” is a contract nobody signed.
Small enough to keep
A devotion that requires an hour, a shopping list, and solitude you do not have will die in a week and then indict you. Choose a scale that survives your actual Tuesday. The daily devotion page gives three sizes. Use the smallest one until it bores you, then add a sentence, not a shopping trip.
What you may be devoted to
- A named deity, with enough reading that you are not inventing a mascot.
- The moon as a clock and a mirror, not as a disinfectant.
- The dead of your care: mentors, friends, queer elders, the person who taught you to cook.
- A craft itself: tarot studied seriously, a garden, a kitchen.
- No addressee at all, only attention. That is still a practice. It is not a failed one.
I will come back tomorrow in some form, even if the form is a glass of water and my own name.