Devon Volkel's Blog, page 65
December 2, 2013
Remove Jealousy From A Lover's Heart
Remove Jealousy From A Lover’s Heart
For this spell you will need:
A pie pan Bay laurel
1 gold candle 1 white candle
Lighter or matches A toothpick
Quartz crystal Catnip
A black cord 10 inches in length
A photo of the person with jealousy
Start this spell long before you actually do it. Cast your circle. Begin with gold candle, set it in the pie pan, and light it, letting it melt within the pan. Once the candle is all the way melted, take the toothpick and inscribe the words, “Protection from jealousy.” Sprinkle the bay laurel and catnip on top and begin your second part, the melting of the white candle. While the candle is melting on top of the gold, take the black cord and begin to tie it in knots, clearing your mind of everything but those thoughts being removed from your lover’s head. As it melts and you tie, chant to your crystal,
Fires burn and candles twitch,
Fabric’s love and trust is stitch.
Unravel doth thou bends with doubt,
Frays and shreds and rips with gout.
Mend the frayed and seal the lost,
At any price, at any cost.
Once the white candle has covered the gold wax, take again your toothpick and inscribe the words, “My mind is protected as long as the white covers the gold.” Press your string into the wax, in a circle around your words. Take your picture and lay it on top, not so that it sticks but so that it is touching the wax. Again, recite these magical words,
Winds of change who crook the trees,
Ignite the night and bend the breeze.
Lift these thoughts from (lover’s) mind,
Wreck the weak and mend the blind.
Take my trust and infuse it here,
Within this realm, which is sincere.
Frejya my lovely, Goddess of protection,
Make it be done, make the correction.
Blessed Be.
Put your pie pan in a windowsill and let the breeze carry your thoughts to your lover.
November 24, 2013
eBooks? Smell the pages... -by Devon Volkel
While eBooks are quickly becoming the fad of the decade, I still love my hand held, old-fashioned, turn the pages and feel the weight of it in your hands, book.
While I do, however, own a kindle and do a lot of my reading on it; I still cannot completely conform to the digital age. I have my series that I love and while it is nice to press a button and buy a new book without having to change out of my pj’s, I still go out and buy the book at some point to add to my shelf.
I know the appeal is just that, pressing a button and getting the latest in a series, trying some on for size by downloading a sample to see it its something you’ll read, carrying hundreds of books in your purse on a virtually weightless little tablet. There is a plethora of appealing factors that call out to us and make us want a device that is capable of such splendors. Especially being a student and being able to download textbooks for a third of the price that they cost in the store.
What’s more, with kindles and electronic books, you have tools to highlight words and passages, look up meanings and definitions with a simple touch, and save pages, paragraphs and words with the same features. It is so much simpler to press a button and be taken to a certain page than having to thumb through a large book to find what you are looking for. Still, with the simplicity of electronic books, I still love my handheld books and my dream come true has always been the vision of me holding my book in my hands for the first time and smelling the pages! =) Ah, what a day that will be!
November 16, 2013
"Though my heart may set in darkness it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly..."
“Though my heart may set in darkness it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
- Sarah Williams
- Sarah Williams
November 13, 2013
Watch From The Dark
Watch From the Dark by Devon Volkel, From my book of poems, Melted Mirrors
To live in the moment and brethe it in deep to soak up the pain and feel it for keeps. To listen to weakness and find where it lurks and seek out your empty to know how it works.
To grasp being broken and take it in stride, to understand pain and still keep your pride. To taste the deceit and learn what it costs and watch from the dark to know being lost.
To capture the anguish and let it take hold, to reveal the lonley and lie in it’s cold. To cry out in agony and know now its grip and wade in the suffering to know how to slip.
To get beat by the aching and remain here to learn to fall off the world and find strength to return. To lose to the EVIL and still keep your smile, is to be able to LIVE for the moments worth while.
Character Devolpment
Devon Volkel: Key tips for character development
I think that connecting readers to characters is very important. If there isn’t someone that you can connect within the story, it makes the entire tale hard to enjoy because of the missing components of pure human emotion. I like to create characters that have elements of people I have come across in my life, different diversities and backgrounds that gives the readers a plethora of people to connect with.
Sometimes I add snippets of my own personal experiences to these characters, making them sort of real in a way and connectable. Being an avid reader, I love to find characters that I can identify with, that way I can be swept into the story and experience it first person. People like having characters that they can relate to and this makes it so that the emotional element of reading is on the front burner.
Having an emotional element to any story is imperative, you connect with the heroine and feel for her when she loses her love, you’re mad at the villain for hurting your beloved heroine, because you have made a connection to her somehow. Somewhere in her, you have bonded with her and now you want to read further, to know what happens to her, and to see where her life goes.
The writer found a way to get your heart strings attached to their heroine and I usually try to achieve this by making the characters as real as possible. I add flaws, vulnerabilities, inconsistencies, mistakes, bad judgment calls, accidentally causing harm and the like. I feel the best way to connect readers to characters is making them as real as you can possibly get them.
November 12, 2013
The Fighter in Me
The Fighter in Me is From the Fight Inside Him.
It was a warm day in October of 2008. The remnants of summer were still in the foreground; green leaves still clung to the trees mixed in with the golden ones, the oranges and yellows. The summer air was still warm to the skin, making the soft breeze nostalgic to the heart, wanting summer to stay and wishing winter would take a year off. I was in the late stages of my pregnancy, more uncomfortable than I had ever been with Braxton-Hicks contractions plaguing my daily life. We had found out a couple weeks prior that my son was breech and upon going in for a version; a manual attempt to turn him in the womb, we found out he was oddly placed inside of me and couldn’t be turned. I was to spend the weekend on my side, trying to get him to turn on his own.
It was Saturday, October fourth, and I awoke with horrible contractions. My fiancé timed them and when we realized that they were only a few minutes apart, we decided to go in to get checked.
When we arrived at the hospital, they checked me out. The nurse told me that they scheduled a C-Section for three p.m. that day, which threw us off guard, as we were suspecting to just be sent home. They informed me that because of my contractions, they wanted to get him out before he tried to come on his own, as he was breech and it would be a very dangerous delivery for him as well as me. We informed the family and then spent the rest of the morning waiting for three o’clock to come.
When the time came, I was prepared for surgery, and they took my fiancé and I back to the operating room. How ominous and scary those rooms are; cold to the touch, sterile and quiet. I tried my best to remain calm as they laid me on the cold table. They set up the dividing screen and prepared for surgery. My fiancé was right by my side and when they asked me if I was ready, I answered, “Yes,” my voice a silent quiver.
All I heard next were the voices of doctors talking in their medical tongues. I didn’t feel anything, just slight tugging and pushing on my belly. After a long moment of intense anticipation, the doctor peeked over the curtain.
“Your son is about to be born,” he said to Dusty, my fiancé, “would you like to watch?”
Dusty nodded silently and then stood up to watch Gauge come into the world.
I am squeamish and didn’t care to know of any details of the going on, I was trying hard enough to remain calm and keep my mind from thinking of what they were doing to my body. Seconds later, I heard the beautiful cries of my newborn baby boy and waited anxiously for the moment he was laid on my chest and I got to kiss him hello.
Dusty sat back down with tears in his eyes, looked at me and said, “He’s beautiful.”
I stifled the tears that were threatening my eyes and waited still for my son to be brought to me.
I had seen one birth before in person but many on the television, as I got accustomed to watching the birthing shows while I was pregnant. In all of them, after the baby was born, with C-sections, they were cleaned and wrapped and then laid on the mother. With normal births, they laid them on the mother right away, and then cleaned, wrapped and returned.
I waited for what seemed like hours for them to bring me my child. Finally, the nurse came over with Gauge wrapped up.
“He’s having a hard time breathing,” she said in a monotonic voice. “We are taking him to the NICU to give him some oxygen.” She held the little baby up to my face for me to kiss him slightly and then he was taken away.
Dusty chose to go with Gauge and I had to stay so that they could finish putting me back together. I had no idea what was going on and nothing really dawned on me yet at that point, I think because of a mixture of the medicine and the rush of just giving birth. After I was all sewn up, they took me into recovery.
I waited in the dark room for hours while the nurses waited for me to be able to feel my feet again. It was such a strange feeling to look down and not be able to move your legs, scary and unnerving. The family visited me two by two and I did my best to stay focused and talk to them. All I was really waiting for was a call from the NICU to find out how much my child weighed and how long he was. I yearned for the normalcy of just giving birth, the fun statistics, the newborn baby at your side, the family coming in with smiles and flowers. This had to be some sort of nightmare. There were no statistics, no newborn baby wrapped up in my arms, no smiles from familiar faces, only sympathetic grins and words of encouragement.
When I was finally able to feel my legs, the nurse that was catering to me knew how badly I wanted to see my child. Unable to walk yet, she rolled the hospital bed down the long hall, towards the NICU.
The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was down the hall from the women’s care unit. There was a painting of a baby giraffe that greeted you, next to the keypad to unlock the door. The nurse scanned her ID and wheeled me in. I got about five feet into the room and could see a crowd of nurses and doctors by where they told me my baby was. I couldn’t see him through the crowd and had no idea what was going on. My nurse left me to go talk to one of his nurses, then returned and began to wheel me out of the room.
“They’re doing something to help him breathe,” she said as she reversed my bed away from my baby. “We have to return later.”
It wasn’t until he was three hours old that I got to see him. He was hooked up to a ventilator, a heart monitor and various other machines. I couldn’t hold him, only look at him and weep.
The next days were the most treacherous of all the days I have lived. My fiancé and other family returned to work and I stayed at the hospital in a room by myself, down a long hallway away from my baby. I wasn’t supposed to walk but the wheelchair wasn’t fast enough; I began walking to him the next day.
When I was all alone, checking my email one morning, the Neonatologist that had been overseeing Gauge came to me with my nurse. She had a look of concern on her face.
“Devon,” she said with no emotion, “it seems that Gauge is really dependent on the ventilator. There is a chance that he won’t make it off of it.”
No words can explain the way I felt. Her words cut into me deeper than any blade ever could. I fell to my knees and cried, if that is even a word for what I did. I don’t know how long I bawled for; I just know that it is the worst pain I ever felt.
Then, something inside of me took over. I stood up, wiped the tears away and returned to the room. I let her tell my family the same thing that she had just told me and when she was gone, I looked to my mom and I said, “No. He is not going to die. He is going to live and everything will be ok.”
This fight arose in me and I wouldn’t let anyone think negatively about my son.
Two days later he came off the ventilator.
He remained in the hospital for a month, and I had to go home at night alone without him, but he lived. There were times that I felt hopeless, but the fighter in me would scream at me when I lost focus and I remembered I was leading him.
The day I took him home from this nightmare was the best day of my life. He is still weak, diagnosed with Congenital Myopathy, but he lived. These were the darkest days of my life but we lived through them and without them I wouldn’t be the woman I am today. Without Gauge, I wouldn’t have been a fighter and without the fighter in me, Gauge would not have been.
Devon Volkel
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who..."
““Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.””
- ― Bernard M. Baruch
- ― Bernard M. Baruch
