Memories of Egypt Day 9 and the Strength Card

​On my ninth day in Egypt, we had another very early start which blessed us with the opportunity to see the sunrise over the beautiful Karnak Temple.  This was one of the sites that I had been looking forward to visiting most because it holds a very special statue of Sekhmet within.  I absolutely adore Sekhmet.  If you aren’t familiar with Egyptian mythology, she is the lioness Goddess.  In my mind she is another form of Bastet.  As the Triple Goddess, she is Bast, Hathor and Sekhmet.  Sekhmet is a warrior Goddess as well as a healer.  Not long after my car accident and “rebirth” of sorts, I took a Religious Studies class and my teacher gave me a necklace of Sekhmet when we finished.  That was five years ago now.  I loved it so much that I posted it on my Facebook page and coincidentally (or not) it came up as a reminder on my timeline yesterday.  That lovely teacher has since passed, but I have worn that talisman almost every single day since she gave it to me.  It just spoke to me.  Or Sekhmet did.  Anyway, this was a very special day and Temple visit for me. Karnak is an enormous site and it would be impossible to talk about all of it, so I will focus on the one thing that stood out for me.

There are just some places in Egypt where for whatever reason you can just become overwhelmed with emotion and the room that held the statue of Sekhmet was one of those places for me.  I remember just standing in front of Her statue and shaking and just not wanting to ever leave.  I am not sure exactly what I thought was going to happen there, but I so desperately wanted to have some sort of miraculous moment where she spoke to me or I saw fireworks, or I left my body or had the most amazing spiritual awakening or something like that right then and there.  I wish I could lie to you and say that had happened, but it didn’t.  We couldn’t be with the statue alone and due to time, we only had 5 minutes to be there which to me felt so rushed and I was so disappointed I could hardly stand it.  For whatever reason as soon as I was out, I just had one of those emotional outbursts and broke down and cried like a baby.  It took me a good 15 minutes to compose myself and if it hadn’t been for my wonderful roommate who just sort of stood there and held space for me, I don’t know if I could have at all.  For the longest time after that I felt like Sekhmet had rejected me somehow, but since then I have changed so much, and I see things differently now.  Today I believe that the wave of emotions that hit me there that day WAS Sekhmet.  The tears that I stood there and wept for so long were a complete and total release and cleansing for me.  It was the total dissolving of “self” and the letting in of something so much better.  The complete and total knowledge that we really are all connected and that there are higher forces that are just beyond our human understanding but that really do care.  I cried for my past. I cried for who I wanted to be but wasn’t, I cried for humanity.  And I am crying now.  It is just hard to explain it.  I think it is the death of the ego that I have read about, but never really understood until that day there at Karnak.  After that rather demonstrative episode I was absolutely exhausted and sort of walked through the rest of the site in a daze.  No, I didn’t see fireworks, but Sekhmet did not reject me that day.  I think she just sort of sank into my pores and right down into my DNA.  I am so grateful for her presence and guidance in my life and I feel like I owe her an apology here for ever doubting it in the first place.  For the record, I do believe in the idea of God, Universe, Creator or whatever else we each might feel comfortable calling That Which Put Us All Here, but I do also believe that this Omnificent Being sends us all extra help, some of which we have in common and others not, but all for our Highest Good.  Whether you call them guides, guardians, or angels, for me, they are mostly Egyptian, and Sekhmet is one.  And you have them too, even if you aren’t aware.  😊

​From Karnak Temple we went on to visit the Temple of Mut.  As wonderful as Karnak was, this Temple just made the day even better.  Here, Mut is considered the Grandmother form of Sekhmet.  There were statues of her EVERYWHERE.  Heaven for Kennedy.  I found one to just sit quietly in front of and meditate on for a while and it brought me such peace after having been so overwhelmed with feelings earlier that day.  Her eyes just seemed full of kindness and understanding.  I really loved it there.  I will say that I couldn’t help but to feel a little distraught that all of these magnificent statues are just sort of sitting outside being abused by the weather.  I wished that there was some way to rebuild it all again and give them back the cover of a Temple roof overhead.  Preservation of history is just something that is so important to me, but time carries on.

​The Tarot card I would pick to represent my experience that day is definitely the Strength card.  Not only does it have a woman with a lion in the imagery, but as I stood there crying my eyes out in front of Sekhmet’s sanctuary, feeling so ridiculous and weak because I just couldn’t stop, she was infusing me with her love and her strength.  The Strength card, like so many others in the deck, has a lot to do with balance.  I am sure that I looked completely mentally unbalanced to the Temple guards that were there that day, but since that experience and my trip to Egypt, I do feel like I have been creating more balance in my life through my own strength.  Not so that I can deal with any problems or troubles that might lie ahead, but in order to fully live this life.  To find the beauty and joy or at least the lesson in every circumstance.  Blessed Be.