La Llorona

She came for you once.

You weren't more than seven or eight, but you were able to push her away all the same, terrified as you were.

It was one of those cold wild nights in October when the wind is unruly, violently throwing dead leaves against your house and the air is full of the scent burning cedar from chimneys.  The day had been full of too many ghost stories at school, greedily gobbled up on the playground even as you knew you would pay for the cheap thrills later.  It was so much easier to speak of ghosts and monsters in the daylight; but at night, the nightmares would come.  Each shadow seemed to move of its own accord.  Each creak that filled the midnight silence seemed like more than just the settling of your home's old bones around you. 

That was how La Llorona found you.  She was the woman you had learned about through playground gossip: the cursed creature doomed to search for her children on the banks of the Rio Grande, a victim of her own pride and shame, drowning her sorrows in rage as she drowned her children, her own life in that muddy water.

You thought it was the wind howling at first.  You had woken with a start, foisted out of your nightmares by the wailing just outside your window.  You pulled your covers tighter around you.  Then it was scratching at the window; your neighbor's pine tree reaching its thick branches across the dividing wall and scraping against the panes.  Nothing strange about that, you told yourself.  It is only nature running its course.

But then you began to think of that neighbor and the swimming pool in the backyard.  You began to think of the child that was taken into its depths never to come back.  You had seen that child at the bottom of that pool once, felt the tug on your heel as you tried to break the surface (there was no mud to obscure the sunlight rippling across the water).  It was then you knew you could never cross that wall again. 

Perhaps it was La Llorona that took him and keeps him there still.  With that thought, the howling wind became her cries, the branches at your window, her fingernails trying to claw her way in.  Coming, coming for you.  You vowed never to listen to the ghost stories on the playground ever again--a short-lived promise--and you vowed never to let yourself become like the child still at the bottom of the pool--that one you kept. 

You felt your home around you; the warmth and the love and the security etched into the bricks and the inside of your rib cage.  The violent howling outside was no match for it.  It--she--could not get in.  Slowly, the wind died, the scratching at your window stopped.  The creaks in your home were once again the sighs a living dwelling makes.  Eventually, sleep found you.  It was your home, you realized years later, that protected you and protects you still.

Now, older, maybe even wiser--but still no less susceptible to thrills of a good ghost story--you carry your home with you (deep inside your chest, sewn into each breath) protection against the forces that would pull you under.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

On Hippie Baby Showers

It is a gathering of goodwill and love for the life about to enter this world.  Although we are more likely to celebrate with burning sage and rose quartz for the mother-to-be than with balloons and baby games, we come ready, yoga hippies that we are, to shower this baby with good vibes.

We do not celebrate this new life in conventional ways, but merely--after our private yoga and meditation, no doubt--unite to pay tribute to this woman's right of passage in the old way--honoring the cycle of womanhood and using our collective energy to nurture mother and child. 

Like fairy godmothers in a folk tale, we all gather round and offer gifts to this new creature: happiness, love, creativity, enjoyment--each gift sealed with the good intentions of the sender.   They come in the shape of clothes and diapers and toys but are no less the embodiment of the life and grace this baby will have.  Though she is not in this world yet, she will absorb the feminine conjuring around her and know, even before she left her mother's womb, that she is loved.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

On Belief

The deepest form of magic.  It's how we conjure day after day, crafting our lives through a series of routines, thoughts, actions, dreams.  It creates our reality and paves the road to our future.  It is the strongest yet most ephemeral of things: belief.

Yes, magic.  Often cast without conscious intention or a clear purpose.  Rather, it is like a well-worn road made by the repeated tread of footsteps.  But like any magic, it is capable of both dark and light.  Sometimes used to stop yourself short of fulfilling your own potential. Stuff like that just doesn't happen to people like me, that's not real life, that's just how things are.  Or used to conjure a deeper way of living. Let's bring this dream into the waking world, this will happen sooner rather than later, what I am searching for will find me in its own time.

If not a well-worn road, let it be a butterfly's wing, so fragile and yet capable of making you fly.  Still not convinced?  Then think of your belief as the silky wisp of a spider's thread: breakable with just one strand but when spun with others, over time it becomes a home that protects and nourishes.  Belief, any way you choose to think of it, is the backbone of our existence, making its home in your spine and radiating outward to craft your world from hopes and dreams and fears and what-will-bes and what-might-have-beens.

So what will you choose to believe in?  What path do you choose to create?  For belief at its strongest, at its most unbreakable, is a fluid thing shaped by nourishing the dreams of our most authentic self.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational collection of musings touching on life’s simple pleasures, everyday enchantments, and delectable recipes that will guarantee to stir the kitchen witch in you.  If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe here.

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On Letting Go of Past Lives

It happens all at once and yet slowly over time like water licking a rock until it is a smooth round pebble. 

The layers of you that need to be shed like a snake's dead skin slip from your body revealing a new incarnation of you with unblemished skin and better eyes with which to see the world.  It is easy, sometimes, to bury the dead; you move or get a new job and the life that came before it is gone, a wisp of memory that your reborn self can look back on and be happy she is no longer there. 

Yet there are those old selves that no longer serve a purpose, the selves that need to be put to rest but are all too easy to keep around because, dead as they are, worn and gone, they are comfortable if only because they are what you know. They are the threadbare and ill-fitting coat that you know you should give away--but that would mean you'd need to find another skin to fit your frame just so...and that takes time and energy, those things you are half-afraid you don't have enough of.  They are the ghosts that keep you company at night, the ones that won't leave until you want them too, the ones you don't even know you're keeping around until one day you stop, having stumbled into an old life, a space you would never willingly enter now.

Then all at once you see how you have been holding on so tightly and yet now find it is harder to keep holding on than it is to let go.  The threadbare coat has finally fallen apart from overuse.  So you gently pry your hands loose from those past selves--those final stray strands--those versions of you that are no longer you, and embrace this new skin.  It is, after all, the only one you need.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

(Haunted) House Hunting!

Houses retain the energies of those who have passed through them.  The longer a person is in a home, the more the house absorbs the energy of that person--for better or worse.   Over the years, those energies settle into the house, becoming part of its foundation. 

I've been thinking about this lately as I've finished my own search for a new home.  Just as important as the big kitchen or the walk-in closet is the vibe of the home.  How do I feel when I enter it?  Does it invite lightness and good energy?  Or am I feeling anxious and heavy as I walk from room to room?  These sensations matter.  They tell us a lot about the residual energy of past residents--energetic hauntings if you will.

My sister, who is also house hunting with her husband right now, always asks the same question when talking to real estate agents: why are the owners selling this home?  What made the previous tenant decide to move?  Her reasoning is simple: she doesn't want a house that has absorbed negative energy from previous owners.  That energy remains and will then affect the quality of her household.  She listens to the answers, both implicit and explicit: the family needed a bigger house after having their second child, the woman is moving in with her boyfriend--both reasons showing a home of growth and abundance. 

She also listens to the half-truths the agents relate:  the house was too much work, the owners wanted a change.  These empty answers can sometimes inadvertently reveal the unsettled energies of the house--especially when paired with that creepy unfinished basement or the random cubbyhole built into the floor of the closet.  

Recognizing a haunted house is in more than just hearing strange whispers and seeing things out of the corner of your eye.  It is more than the cemetery in the back of the house, or the weird illustrations coating the walls in the attic.  It's about the feel of the house.  More than one friend has told me about an outwardly fine home they didn't like for no other reason than the fact that they felt uneasy in that space.  These impressions tell us that it isn't the right home for us--its energies are not our energies.  Or worse, there is seriously bad juju that saturates the walls, left there by former tenants.

Or course, not all hauntings are bad.  My apartment in Seattle was totally haunted--it was once an old mansion that was converted into an apartment building many years ago, so naturally, it had seen a lot of things and absorbed a lot of different vibes.  And not all the energy was the same from room to room in that building.  The laundry room in the basement, for example, was dark and heavy, as was the greenish corridor with the yellowed sunken-in flooring you had to walk down to get to it--certainly no place I would want to find myself alone at night, even though it was tucked inside a safe apartment complex.  On the flip side, my apartment itself was characterized by lots of friendly light that poured in through giant windows.  It was a happy space, a sanctuary from the heaviness of school.  I'd come to see my one-bedroom apartment as having its own spirit--a light, bright, playful spirit that had no room for droll professors or even more boorish theory books.  I was more than happy with this haunting, as we were in perfect agreement.

I felt the same zing in that apartment as I did in finding my new place here in Albuquerque.  That's how I knew this new home was right.  After months of searching for the right new home, I finally found the one that spoke to me (okay, an apartment!).  It didn't have creepy dark alleyways right behind it, or fake faded flowers outside its door; it didn't have dirty corners and thin walls; it didn't have sterile rooms or cold kitchens.  It was simply bright light and warmth, homey and clean, at once cozy yet spacious.  Our energies were simpatico.

So, is this new place haunted?  Probably, but from where I'm standing, it's absorbed nothing but good energy, so I'm happy with the kind of haunted it is.  I just hope it likes green chile stew and old movies as much as I do.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!