Everyday Enchantments by Lunaea Weatherstone
- Sage Woman Magazine #66
Enchantment
In my work as a teacher and priestess, one of the things I hear most often from women is that they can't seem to set aside any time in their very full lives to do ritual or magic. It can be a challenge to make the time to do magic to make more time! What's a busy woman to do?
One answer is to combine real-world action with magical symbolism. By bringing physical action into the mix, you start the manifestation ball rolling, so to speak, and give the magic a big jumpstart toward your goals. You are also multi-tasking, which most women probably do even in their sleep.
Let's say you have been feeling that your life is chaotic, that you have lost your way in the entanglements and details of day-to-day living. Common ways to do magic and ritual to smooth the path ahead would be to perhaps do some symbolic knot-untying, or to meditate upon a tarot card that represents skill in the worldly arena.
But for a change of magical pace, try this instead: Choose an area of your home that continually bugs you, something that adds to your feeling of chaos and frustration with details (my choice would be the ubiquitous kitchen junk drawer). Your ritual tool for this is a big plastic trash bag.
Center yourself in your usual way, and ask the Goddess to bless your action with purpose, insight, and energy. Then take up your empowered trash bag, open that drawer, and start tossing! With each item you ruthlessly discard, affirm your intention to strip away things that no longer serve you.
Invite the true priorities to come to the surface in your world. With each item you save, acknowledge its helpfulness and ask the Mother to bless you with recognition of help in all your endeavors. When your drawer is tidy and spacious once again, take a moment to admire its orderliness.
Say a blessing to ground this sense of peace and accomplishment inside you, to make it part of yourself now and forever. Feel the empowerment that comes from toting that trash bag out to the garbage and releasing it.
As one of my Ninth Wave students said when she performed the "Hefty Bag ritual": "I am amazed at how when I invoke the Goddess in me things manifest...I am standing strong even in the chaos."
Recently I used a similar idea to work a little charm about time and energy leaking away from me. By envisioning myself in control of my resources while I sewed up a rip in a pillow that was leaking stuffing, I was reinforcing my magical intention as well.
In another sewing example, if you are feeling disconnected or fragmented, it's an excellent time to sew on some buttons. Buttons represent what holds us together, makes us snug, secure, and warm. There is a special magic in the things that connect. Make sewing on loose or missing buttons a ritual of pulling yourself together.
Then when you get dressed, give thanks for the people, the rituals, the daily comforts and special occasions that keep you from flying apart. (This sewing magic can also be used to bless your loved ones.)
Feeling stuck, as if your life has no forward momentum? Let your magical intentions to get unstuck be symbolized by putting some energy into your car. Change your oil, check your tire pressure, clean all that junk out of the trunk. If you've been stalling (no pun intended!) About some needed mechanical work, get it done if you can.
Bless your vehicle as a symbol of movement, the journey of life, the adventure that waists around the next bend. Put on a life-affirming bumper sticker from your rear view mirror, and then go for a drive, making each mile you travel an affirmation of your ability to really go places in your life.
When spaciness and a sense of ungroundedness has you adrift, put some attention into your feet - more specifically, into your shoes! Pull out all your shoes and boots and check them over for any needed care. Clean them up, resole them if needed, or get new ones if you like. Pay attention to comfort and to aesthetics too.
Organize your shoes in their closet so you can easily choose the appropriate footwear for your daily path. As you dress, bring your consciousness into the act of putting your feet into your shoes, giving yourself a protected pair of back paws to plant firmly on Planet Earth.
Sometimes the sense of not being grounded goes deeper, to a feeling of being spiritually lost. Especially when our lives are so busy, it can seem as if everything goes by in a blur, without time to reflect and let the wisdom of life's lessons sink in. A task you can use to grasp some comfort in such times is to put up some food for future use.
In times of plenty, both physical and spiritual, we add to our wealth of faith in the Goddess's love and the goodness of the world. When that faith needs a boost, the act of cooking, canning, and setting that food by reinforces that you do know where your spiritual sustenance lies. You will be blessed again when it comes time to eat what you have faith-fully preserved.
We all know about blessing your work as you do it, but as you can see, here we are taking it one step further: you actually choose and seek out what work you will do for each magical or ritual purpose.
Of course you will still invoke for clearer vision whenever you wash your windows, but also remember to go wash those windows when you need clearer vision! Mixing the magical with the mundane is what makes every day enchanting. Added up, those days make a lifetime lived in true connection with the Goddess and Her gifts.
- Lunaea Weatherstone serves as Grove Mother to the Sisterhood of the Silver Branch, which offers year-long programs in Goddess-based spirituality. She is a found mother of SageWoman, as well as a priestess, artist, and tarot counselor.
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