Monthly Deity - Hephaestus
Alright, folks! This month, we’re honoring Hephaestus and His virtues of Creativity and Diligence!
Hephaestus is a really interesting deity, I love His origin and how resilient He is. Of all the Gods He’s the one that really represents courage and strength to me. He had to love Himself and see His own self worth despite what His parents showed Him. His story wasn’t about courage or self worth either, they were just implied and assumed. Hephaestus is incredibly strong and brilliant, so I’m really excited to see how this month goes!
Virtue number one is Creativity! This makes sense considering He’s the god of Blacksmithing (among other things), but I don’t think this is just about being fun and writing more stories. Hephaestus strikes me as pretty practical, so I think this virtue would look more at applying your creativity to work or trying to fix something up. I think I’ll try to combine those ideas this month. Half of it will be working on my fun creativity, maybe I’ll start writing again, and the other half will be working to expand my practical creativity!
The second value this month is Diligence, or making sure that you give everything careful and persistent effort. This one is also pretty work related, though it can be used in other aspects of your life too. The whole idea of this virtue is that if you rush through something you’ll get a lower quality product. That can be writing an essay for school, organizing a desk at work, or even cooking yourself dinner. Not only will slowing down and focusing on your work give you chicken parm that’s actually good to eat, you’ll also feel less overwhelmed. Sure, your Honeydew List at work takes up half a page, but is that because it’s full of quick and simple tasks or long descriptions of a few major ones? If you slow down and give each job the attention it deserves you’ll come out feeling more pride in what you’ve done today. That’s why I think I’ll start with diligence. I haven’t been doing myself justice by dashing through my day only to feel exhausted and pseudo-proud in what I managed to get done, I’m gonna take my time with this!