Magical Tools
(David)
Do you use any?
My set of tools is small, quite modest in nature and limited to my regular practice. Most things on my altar are natural, like the pieces of granite that help me to ground myself in various circumstances and also exist as anchors for my returns from journeying in the Otherworld. My wand is a 6-inch length of Sweet Pippin, the apple tree in my grove whose spirit guided me upon my request to this particular piece of a slender branch lying on the ground below. My candles are tealights, and their holder rough ceramic. My scrying mirror is just a piece of dark glass. The only technology involved in anything is my electric salt lamp. Nothing is fancy.
I’m certainly not claiming any sort of purity in this. No sort of moral superiority. Everything is simply simple, which suits my personality and my practice.
I’ve got a bit of a thing about practitioners on various platforms whose product is always shiny sparkling perfect. Because, truly? Life isn’t like that. Often, it’s messy. Things rarely go right first time around. Nothing is ever perfect, except perhaps in appearance with the aid of technology. I’ll give some of those practitioners credit for their effective glamour magic.
An occurrence in our house yesterday was a good example of the messy nature of nearly everything, when I tried to dress my apple wand with one of my stone bracelets.
I regularly charge several items, including my wand and my everyday jewellery (a gold ring and two bracelets of stones from Africa, one blue and one green, both of them dedicated originally to saving trees in their respective countries) with energy from Earth, Moon, Planets, Sun, and Stars for my strength and protection, and I visualise that with them every day in my shower ritual. It’s important to me.
Well, the blue bracelet is threaded on string that is still firmly knotted and good, while the green one’s string has been ever closer to disintegrating.
I’m aware of the theory that when a piece of enchanted jewellery breaks—an enchanted anything that is—it means the spell is done, and all that remains to be decided then is how to dispose of the ingredients.
But I feel the strength of this charging and direction remains in both the bracelets, and the ring, and the wand. All together. So, yesterday morning I cut the green bracelet’s thread and prepared to glue it along the length of my wand.
I didn’t intend it to be a fancy dressing. Just wished to keep them together in my ongoing work.
My wife had to take over, because we only had one bottle of glue in the house and she’s worked with it before. She said it’s a nightmare, gets everywhere, takes hours to go off during which time the two things if they have any weight will inevitably slide under gravity and fall apart before they’re set together. But mostly, she said, it’s a bloody mess and you’ll end up with your arthritic fingers all glued up for days.
She did it for me. She’s practical and excellent at making stuff happen, but it all went exactly as she predicted. Ugh.
We left the wand and bracelet outside where the glue fumes wouldn’t make me ill and any run-off wouldn’t harm anything. And when I went out for a look only a few minutes later they had indeed parted company already. Ugh.
I intended to let the glue go off for maybe 24 hours, then bind the bracelet to the wand with thread. Which I decided should have bloody done from the start as soon as she warned me about the glue.
And that, I thought, was my day.
Except that five hours later, my wife passed the wand to me through our study window. Unbeknown to me she’d had another go at it, and the glue had set. My wand and bracelet are joined together. Not perfectly, as if shop bought, but firmly and with love and belief. Happy David!
How about you? Do you use any tools? What are they, and do things sometimes get messy for you too?
