I am the goddess Vesta, known to the Greeks as Hestia, and I am truly honored to have this time with you this morning. Very simply, I represent the Center, or better put, the Heart: I am the Heart of the Temple, the Heart of the Hearth, the Heart of the Self. I am a Virgin Goddess, meaning that I am whole-unto-myself, my own person, needing no other person to complete me. I not only tend to the Eternal Flame, I am that; the vital life spark and spirit which burns at the Heart of all that is. I reflect the light of all that is sacred, and so brightly do I burn that the largest asteroid in our sky is named for me. My totem is the circle, symbol of infinity and wholeness. Focus, commitment, devotion, discernment, and sacred sexuality are my divinity.
I am the essence of Being, for I simply Am. There are no statues attesting to my life because how do you create form from the formless? In this, I am the essential and divine feminine, for I love and honor being over doing. I am the least known and visible of all of my sister goddesses for my way of being is foreign to those who now run the world. As with my sisters, my story has been twisted based on fear, misunderstanding, and the pursuit of ownership and power. They have taken my sacred sexuality and made it a sin punishable by death. They have taken my devotion and manipulated and used it for their own gain. But I tell you this, my temple priestesses were among the very last to capitulate to the conquering Roman church. They fear me because they cannot control me. They despise me because they cannot understand me with their minds for I am a felt sense, and I do not need to do in order to be. I find the sacred in the everyday, in the mundane, in the ordinary. I find the holy in each moment. In truth, I am the sacred; I am the holy; I am the moment.
I am your indwelling spirit, your inner-most being, your aliveness; your own sacred, your own holy. Though I am veiled and a mystery, you know me innately and intimately, and I am here with you always. I cannot not be for this is who you are, what gives you life itself. I am not your story, your past, what you believe in, nor am I the labels you wear nor the clothes that cover your precious body. I come before these and am beyond these. For I am that which nothing can touch, the flame that cannot be extinguished, the aliveness that is your birthright; though the world we inhabit does everything in its power to snuff it out of existence.
Finding me again is simple but rarely easy. You may glimpse me in a rare moment of stillness. In the newborn's cry, the bird's wing or song, the wave folding in on itself before returning to its source. You may cry out for me in loss that feels too great to bear, in the river cascading from the near vertical mountainside, its spray sparkling like diamonds in the sun; in your despair and your anguished longings. You will touch me in pleasure, and in the rare experience of bliss. But time and again you will take yourself from me⁓from yourself, really, for we are not separate⁓for the dance of waking to who you truly are, to this warmth, this vitality, this fire, is fraught with rule breaking, with haunting themes of safety, even of survival. Though it is also true that once touched you will not be able ever to completely forget, try as you may, and you do. For the truth is also that nothing that is touched by fire is ever the same again. The paths home are as many and as varied as you. It matters not which you take, it matters only that you do, that you find those moments, for you can exist without me but you cannot truly live. You need me, yes. But I also need you. I need you, your loved ones need you, you need you, the world and all that is needs you.
