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Monday. White flowers and a clear glass of cool water for my eggun, a cafecito poured the way my abuelo liked it (far too sweet), and their names said out loud. Five minutes. It anchors the whole week.

Chrysanthemum tea for Double Ninth

Double Ninth was yesterday, the ninth day of the ninth month. Nine is the most yang of numbers, so two of them together is a lot of yang, and the custom is to climb somewhere high and look after your elders. I took my father, who is 81 and insisted on carrying the thermos himself. At the top of the hill in the park we drank chrysanthemum tea: a small handful of dried flowers, five or six goji berries and one lump of yellow rock sugar, steeped in hot (not boiling) water. Watching the flowers open in the cup is half of it. My father says they look like old men waking up from a nap. He would know. We poured a little on the ground for my mother, who loved this festival, and walked down slowly. Water wins by yielding. So do knees.

Two ravens at the offering stump

First Sunday of every month I pour a horn of mead and leave a heel of bread at the back of the property, where the forge yard meets the trees. It's for the landvættir, the spirits who were here long before my mortgage. Usually it all just soaks into the moss. This time two ravens came down to the stump before I'd even turned around. Took the bread, ignored the mead entirely, looked straight at me and made that deep knocking sound ravens make. Critics. My daughter (8) watched from the porch and announced, 'They're Huginn and Muninn and they're reporting back.' I'm not going to be the one to argue. Next month the bread gets a little honey.

Watching the divo

We Zoroastrians don't really have 'meditation' the way my yoga friends mean it. But we do have fire, and we do have quiet. In the evenings I light the divo: a little glass of water with a layer of oil floating on top and a cotton wick in a tin float. It sits on a steel thali on the kitchen shelf, nowhere near the curtains, and I never leave the room while it's lit. The cat has been informed. Then I simply sit and look at it while my tea cools. For us, fire is a symbol of Ahura Mazda's light and of asha, truth and right order. Ten minutes with the flame and I remember which side I'm trying to be on.

The patient who wanted to hear the rain

Details changed, as always, for someone who can't speak for himself anymore. A few weeks ago I cared for a retired fisherman in his last days. He wasn't talking much by then. Mostly he slept, and when he woke he'd look toward the window. His daughter told me he'd spent his whole life listening to weather, reading it from the deck, and now the room was sealed and quiet and climate controlled. So we opened the window. Just a crack. It was raining, the soft kind that barely makes a sound, and the sound filled the room anyway. His breathing changed. His hand, which had been clenched on the blanket for two days, opened. I've been a hospice nurse for nine years and a Zen student for longer, and I still catch myself wanting to fix things. Adjust the pillow, check the line, find one more task. That afternoon there was nothing to fix. There was only rain, an old man, his daughter and me, sitting together while the weather did what it had always done. He died that night, with the window still open. Dogen says to study the self is to forget the self. I think I understood it a little better in that room than in years on the cushion. Nobody needed me to be anything. I just needed to be there, and to let the rain in.

My father's tesbih

Baba is ill in Istanbul, the slow kind of ill that makes a son on another continent feel useless. Last night we were on a video call and he was too tired to talk, so he said, 'Then let's just do dhikr.' So we did. Him in his chair by the window in Kadıköy, me at my kitchen table in Chicago, each with a tesbih of thirty-three beads. La ilaha illallah, over and over, his voice a little behind mine because of the delay. We said nothing else for twenty minutes. I have never felt closer to him. Please keep him in your prayers, whatever shape your prayers take.

The Salve Regina in the dark

At Compline we turn the lights down until there is only the one lamp by the icon of Our Lady. Then the Salve Regina, from memory, because nobody can see the book anyway. Brother Anselm is eighty-three and sings a quarter-tone flat. For my first month I found it maddening. Now I listen for him. If he isn't there, something is wrong. After the last note comes the Great Silence, until morning. No talking in the corridors, just shoes on stone and the bell. I'm learning that the silence is not an absence of prayer. It is where the prayer goes to finish itself.

My first tarot pull, and a question

Bought a secondhand Rider-Waite deck this weekend after reading far too many posts in this category. Shuffled it badly for a long time, asked something vague about work, and drew the Hermit. First reaction: great, the card for being alone. But the little booklet says it's more about stepping back to look inward, carrying your own light. Which, honestly, is exactly what I've been avoiding at work. For the readers here: when you were starting out, did you read straight from the booklet, or just look at the picture and see what came? I'd rather not start with bad habits.

For the boats still out

Gale warning for sea area Plymouth tonight, and three of the harbour boats still out past the Lizard. The whole village does the same thing on nights like this: checks the forecast forty times and pretends not to. I put Gran's old storm lantern in the window (battery-powered now, I'm not daft), set a dish of salt on the sill, and said what she always said: Mother of the deep water, hold them light as gulls, put the wind at their backs and the harbour lights before them, and bring them home before the tide turns twice. Two came in by ten. The third rang in from Newlyn at midnight, safe and sheltering. I slept like a stone.

Reality checks for the very new

A few of you have messaged asking how to start lucid dreaming, so here's what actually worked for me, minus the mystical packaging: 1. Pick one check and do it twenty times a day. Mine is pressing a finger into my palm. Awake, it stops. Dreaming, it sometimes goes through. 2. Read something, look away, read it again. Dream text rarely holds still. 3. Ask 'am I dreaming?' and actually mean it. Doing it on autopilot doesn't carry over. It took me about six weeks the first time. Be patient and be kind to your sleep. If it's making you anxious or wrecking your rest, stop. The dreams aren't going anywhere.

Asking the hedge first

Hedge-laying season has started, which means three months of mud, hazel stakes and the good kind of sore shoulders. Before the first cut on any new stretch, I do the same small thing: hand flat on the oldest stem, three slow Awens, and a plain request out loud to lay it well and let it grow back thicker. A splash of water from my flask at the roots and a "diolch" to the hawthorn. No robes, no audience, just me and a nosy robin. A laid hedge isn't killed, it's renewed. The cut stems keep living and send up new growth all along the line. Every winter I'm reminded that most of the good things in my life came from something being bent, not broken.

A hag stone, asked for

Found my first hag stone on Saturday: a flint pebble with a hole worn clean through it by the water, sitting on a gravel bar like it had been waiting. Old folk wisdom says if you look through one you can see the hidden folk, or at least see things as they really are. I asked before I picked it up. I know how that sounds. But I have a rule about taking from the land: ask, wait, leave something. I left a few oat flakes and a promise to carry out the litter I'd passed on the way (two crisp packets and one very sad flip-flop). I'd rather have one stone from my own river than a bag of something shipped across the world. Local stones know the local weather.

I put my grandmother's pendulum in a spreadsheet

Background: engineer, skeptic, but my farmor's brass pendulum has a strange track record in our family. So I ran an experiment. Setup: 200 yes/no questions with answers I could check later (coin flips, sealed envelopes my sister prepared, next-day weather). Half the time I knew the answer while asking. Half the time I didn't. Results: • When I knew the answer: pendulum 'correct' 91% of the time. • When I didn't: 52%. Basically a coin flip. So the ideomotor effect is real, and my hands know what my head knows. Case closed, right? Except here's the part I didn't expect. During the trials where I knew the answer, it started moving before I'd consciously decided anything, like it was showing me what I believed faster than I could think it. Which made me wonder whether my farmor was ever asking the pendulum to predict the future. Maybe she was asking it to tell her what she already knew, underneath the worry. Last week I tested that the honest way. I'd been going back and forth on a job offer for days. Held the pendulum, asked 'Do I want this?' and it swung a hard yes before I'd even finished the sentence. I sat there laughing, because the spreadsheet would say that's just my own muscles. And yes. That's the point. I'd been ignoring them for a week. I took the job. Farmor would have said 'I told you so' in Swedish, over coffee. Still a skeptic. Slightly less smug about it.

Dime in the shoe, psalm on the porch

Our niece Tanya drove up to Atlanta for nursing school this week, her first time living away from home. Before she left I sent her off the way my uncle sent me: an old silver Mercury dime in her left shoe, the 91st Psalm read over her on the front porch, and a little red flannel bag in the glovebox with salt, a bay leaf and a picture of her grandmama. She asked if the dime actually does anything. I told her it reminds her she's got people praying behind her. That's what it does. She texted me last night: "Made it. Shoe's uncomfortable." Good. Means she's still wearing it.

Sopdet before dawn

Up at 5 to feed the cat (Bast's representative on earth, as she would remind you), and Sopdet was blazing over the neighbor's roof. Sirius, to most people. In ancient Egypt her return to the dawn sky announced the flood and the new year; this time of year she's just a bright, flickering companion for insomniacs and cat owners. The Egyptians tracked 36 decan stars rising through the night, ten days each, and some Middle Kingdom coffins have star clocks painted on the inside of the lid. Possibly so the dead could tell the hour (the purpose is debated; I like this reading). I saw one in a museum years ago and still think about it: someone wanted their beloved to never lose track of time. Poured a little water on the balcony for her and went back to bed.

Psalm 121 at Harold's bedside

Went up to the hospital this week to sit with Harold, who sang bass beside me in the choir for thirty years. He's had a hard fall and a harder week. He can't sing right now, so I told him I'd do the praying for both of us. Psalm 121, the one his mother used to say: 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.' He mouthed along the whole way. When I got to 'the Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in,' he squeezed my hand so hard I thought I'd need a doctor myself. Folks ask how a deacon can also be a rootworker. Same answer every time: it's all the Psalms, it's all the Lord, and it's all love for the people in front of you.

The Cloud of Unknowing, and the bread

Brother Anselm gives me the bread every Tuesday now, which is either an honour or a penance depending on how it rises. I've been reading The Cloud of Unknowing with my novice master. The anonymous author says we can't reach God by thinking, only by love, and that we should 'beat upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love.' I've loved that line since I first read it, and I've also had no idea how to actually do it. On Tuesday I was kneading, eight loaves' worth, and somewhere around minute six my mind did its usual thing. Lists. Latin vocabulary. Whether my mother is sleeping well. And then, for a short while, it stopped. Not emptied, exactly. Just the push and fold, the heel of my hand, the dough growing smoother and warmer. One small word kept returning with each push. I won't say which word; the Cloud suggests keeping it to a single syllable, and keeping it to yourself. When I told my novice master, I expected him to say that was only concentration, not prayer. He thought for a long time, as he does, and said, 'The author was a monk. He probably made bread too.' The loaves were a bit dense. Brother Anselm said they tasted prayerful, which I have decided to take as a compliment.

Havdalah and the smell of cloves

My favorite prayer of the week takes about four minutes. Saturday night, three stars out, the braided candle lit, a cup of wine, the spice box passed around. My study group taught me the old idea that we're given an extra soul on Shabbat, the neshamah yeteirah, and that it leaves us at Havdalah. The spices are there to comfort the soul that stays behind. I think about that every week now, breathing in the cloves like it's a hug. Then we hold our fingers up to the flame to see the light on our nails, douse the candle in the wine with a little hiss, and say shavua tov. A separation between holy and ordinary, and somehow the ordinary week feels holier for it.

Winter Nights in the rain, as is tradition

Winter Nights blót this weekend. Oregon delivered its usual sideways rain, which honestly feels right. The old calendar marks this as the turning toward winter, the time to honor the dísir, the ancestral mothers, and the land-wights who put up with us all year. We kept it small. Me, my wife, the two kids, and my brother-in-law, who isn't heathen but has never once missed a meal. We stood at the edge of the back field under the big Douglas fir. I forged the stand for the horn myself this summer, so of course it leaned. We hailed the land-wights first, since it's their place and we're the guests. Then the ancestors by name, as many as we could remember: my farfar Olav who fished out of Bergen, my wife's grandmother Ruth who taught three generations of her town to read. The kids poured apple cider from their own little cups and each said one thing they were thankful for. My daughter (8) thanked the wights for the blackberries. My son (4) thanked them for "the mud." Can't argue. The mead went round the horn once and the rest went onto the roots of the fir. Afterward we had a fire in the iron bowl with the hose already uncoiled beside it, because a blacksmith who disrespects fire doesn't stay a blacksmith long. Nothing dramatic happened. Nothing needed to. The rain eased right as we finished, which my daughter has decided was the wights saying "you're welcome." I'm not going to correct her.

One acorn from under the old oak on the ridge, now in my coat pocket, holding my patience for me until spring. The oak dropped about four thousand of them. I don't think it'll miss one.