Meeting Sekhmet

 

The meditation started as most do, music and softly spoken guiding words. I closed my eyes and that other world blazed forth into my inner vision. I saw the bright sun shining across the sand. Pyramids rose to my right as I stepped onto the ancient road. Walking past the pyramids, I saw temples in the distance ahead. I walked on through the scorching sun unaffected by its rays. I walked as though accustomed to the heat. My strides were confident my clothes hung loosely, floating on the occasional breeze. The sun blazed.

Across the broad paving stones I strode. I walked past the marble pavement, past the great temples, to the end of the Pharoes Road, to wear the road became a path, then the path was overgrown. I remembered the way I was going, I had been a boy here. Though 4000 years may have past I remembered well the way. The path to the ancient statue of Sekhmet, the Queen of the Desert. Her breath was like the hot wind off the shifting dunes. As I walked I remembered the sound of roaring in the ancient enclosure of the lions. A sound that now is no more. 

I sat on the ground then, at the foot of the ancient statue. They call her the monster now. The statue of the Lion Goddess. There are stories told among the locals and the tour guides, animals are sometimes found dead at her feet, some say then get a creepy, haunted feeling in her presence at night. So she remains at the lonely end of a forgotten road hidden by brambles and fallen stones. 

Still she stands, her face almost worn away from the weather and wind. The sand storms blast at her for millennia yet she still stands unperturbed and undisturbed. For what is time to the life of an ancient gods? She is still remembered, her name still worshiped and venerated. Not forgotten, still living with the energy of the prayers offered in her name. 

I shifted my perception to the meditation, lost in the background of my own journey, the voice of the guide spoke. Her words diving deep into my consciousness, close at hand from the depths I had already plumbed. Then I inhabited the goddess, or she me, we interpenetrated one another, until there was no other. I looked out at the vast desert cloaked in darkness, the full moon shining down on her as her mighty stone body rose to her sandled feet. She strode then across the sand, walking in the moonlight. She walked at twice the stride of a human. Her long legs stretching and springing into each silent step. 

I saw though her eyes in the distance an oasis far out, her strides tracing a long forgotten road she alone remembered. As she approached torches were lit, the soft glow of their fire glimmering through the distant darkness. She entered the oasis and sat down on a carpet that was laid out in anticipation of her arrival. She sat gazing out into the darkness, then stood turning back to the oasis, reaching into her belt she withdrew a golden dagger and cut a circle in the sand. Then a golden throne appeared and she sat upon it. Staring across the sand in the line of the moonlight she held out her hands and two golden orbs appeared, one above each hand. I spoke then, asking the meaning of the orbs, and heard her inward reply "to restore the balance". 

So we sat in peace, silence and calm as she measured the balance of the world. Slightly adjusting the golden orbs periodically moving them to some inner reading I was simply too blunt an instrument to discern. I began to feel the pull of the meditation to return to ordinary space and I awoke from my revery as a gong sounded somewhere far away. 

The connection I formed with the Lady of the Lions remained unbroken and I was able to close my eyes and return to her still sitting in the moonlight shifting the balances of the world with her floating golden orbs. My impression of her was one of pure power. Impenetrable strength. She sits as a pillar of the Universe supporting this reality. Perhaps the time of balance she spoke of is again close at hand?