Small Offerings
This week’s prompt:
I want you to write about small offerings. Offerings made on a daily or weekly basis, or offerings made spontaneously, rather than offerings that need more thought put into them, or are part of bigger things like rituals.
Write about those small moments of remembering the gods and spirits, and the small things you give back to them.
Part of me wants to say “there are no small offerings”, but I also see the distinction here, and know it’s one that’s important to point out. “Offering” (much less “sacrifice”) is a word with a sense about it that can seem almost always grand, a whole animal, or a tenth of one’s gains, that sort of thing. But I’ve found that a really good route to spiritwork practice has been in making offerings a regular part of my life.
My current path really did start with me setting up a bowl in our kitchen as a tiny shrine to our house-spirits. I put in a bit of every meal we cooked in the house, and poured a bit of every alcoholic drink we opened in the house. It made me pause and think before I ate something, acknowledging the context I’m in and who I’m in it with (visible and invisible) and it’s still a thing I do my best to do here and now a decade later (though I admit I forget sometimes).
My other regular offering started up soon after, built into the weekly devotional nights that I had already been doing for a couple years at that point. It started off as just water in a bowl at my altar but now it’s service at three altars in the house: At the hearth altar, there’s water for spirits of home and land, and fire and incense for the spirits of my community here. At the ancestor altar, there’s fire and water for them, and then there’s several offerings up at my personal altar, fire and incense and water for the Wanderers and more water for array of spirits personal to me (“You who make me up”, “You who guide me”, and “You who challenge me”) and then a food offering for my guardian/servitor and an energy/emotion offering for the Singer-in-Silence. It sounds like a lot when I write it out (and really I could (maybe should) do a whole entry on each one of those groups here) but to me now it feels like a good flow that really gets me into the right mindset for the rest of my devotional work for the night, by reminding me of all the connections I have.
To me that’s most of what offerings are about: turning my thoughts to them and building a connection. It feels like other social connections in some ways. When I’m out with friends, we will sometimes buy drinks for each other. Sometimes, this is because one or the other of the group might not have the same amount of money to spend on themself. More often though, it’s not a matter of covering for someone because of need, but to show that we’re thinking of them. Maybe it’s in honor of something someone did, maybe because we know they’ll like this particular drink, maybe it’s just random. In any case, it’s something that brings happiness both in the receiving and the giving.
It’s like that with offerings as well. I don’t know that the gods and spirits usually need anything from me, but they certainly appreciate being thought of, and having that thought become action even through the simple pouring of water. And as I said above, I get a lot out of it as well, feeling enmeshed in a comforting network of connections as I do my work, or just go about my day.