Happy Vestalia!
Celebrating and giving thanks to Vesta today. Marking the holiday by cleaning Vesta’s shrine in my house lararium and offering her a handcrafted crown of fresh roses, a mola salsa of hand-ground barley and salt, wildflower honey from bees belonging to members of my extended family, and herbed olive oil gifted by my mother.
Vesta was the first deity to whom I dedicated a shrine. It is with her I have built my most formal relationship through small weekly and monthly rituals sharing barley and keeping lit an (electric) flame. I bought this red lantern on impulse more than a decade before I ever entertained the idea of reaching out to divinities. I never had a use for it but nor I could bring myself to part with it. It belonged to her all along(!) and the moment I made the decision to dedicate space as a lararium that it would be my hearth. Most of my other relationships with deities tend towards informality, introspection, spontaneity, experience, and peregrination. Rooting my bond with Vesta in ritual, within my home, provides the bedrock for all other relationships I seek to build.
She is the porch light left on for the expected returning. She is the welcome of cool bedsheets at the end of a long day. She is the protective darkness and solemn quiet against an overwhelming world. Today and all days I thank her for offering me and mine safety and respite 🙏
