Reading note: I love recipes and cookbooks, so this prose poem is a play on the recipe genre. It’s also a tongue-in-cheek look at people in the new age/witchy culture (and, okay, all of us) that look for complex magical solutions to things that often just need a different kind of magic—a shift in perspective, for example. The other spells in the series are the Protection Spell and the Cleansing Spell.
Transformation Spell
Ingredients:
Cotton balls - as many as you need
Your deepest desire—you know which one I’m talking about
1 bottle of rubbing alcohol
1 tangled ball of yarn
1 bundle of nerves
1 pen
1 sheet of paper
1 brick from the wall you’ve built up in your head, keeping you from the thing you want most
1 door that won’t open or 1 window sealed shut—whichever frustrates you more
essential oils (optional and only if you’re desperate)
Salt (see above aside)
Tools:
1 match
1 bottle of lighter fluid
1 trash can
Instructions:
Step One: Take the brick and use it to smash open the closed door or break through the window. Try and try and try until one day it smashes open and you can finally break free. Visualize it to make it so.
Is it still not opening? That’s okay. You don’t really need the brick or the closed door or the sealed window, except to serve as a reminder of everything that frustrates you and makes you feel stuck.
Maybe now is a good time to think about why you bothered to keep an old door or rusty window around in the first place. That’s a lot of work, lugging it about. Don’t even get me started about that brick—how long have you been building that wall up between you and the life you want?
Of course, if you thought of all that, you’d then have to wonder if maybe that door should stay shut, maybe it wasn’t meant to be open. Or maybe you never wanted to throw those windowpanes wide in the first place.
Step Two: Using the pen and paper, make a list of all the things you need to do for positive self-improvement—see how important it makes you feel?
Better yet, chart your growth. Join a club and let them clap for you as you earn your gold star while you pretend to act demure. And when you get home, ask yourself: is this a transformation, or another thing to keep you from yourself?
Step Three: Still with me? Now we’re getting somewhere! Use the rubbing alcohol and cotton balls to scrub off all the old labels from your skin. Don’t be surprised if your skin is red and your eyes water while you do this. It’s a hard thing to let it all go.
Step Four: Now you can practice mindfulness—carefully work to make sense of your tangled ball of yarn and loosen every knot. Growth comes from working with what you’ve got, after all, and never, ever giving up.
After a while, you might start thinking about why you need to make yourself suffer. That’s good. It means you’re finally learning. Do you really want to spend your afternoon feeling virtuous and so very frustrated for trying to hold on to every scrap of frayed yarn that once held you together? So when you get tired of that pointless exercise, throw it in the trash.
Step Five: Here comes the hardest part of all. Take your deepest desire out of the locked box you keep it in and look at it. I mean really look at it. Your eyes might water here, too, but for different reasons. Make peace with the thing you’ve kept from yourself. Let it in.
Step Six: Go ahead and throw away all the tacky glue, wet cotton balls, and pilled-papered bits from Step 3, too, everything but your deepest desire. Even that bundle of nerves that you don’t really need for anything but that follows you around until you don’t know what a day feels like without wringing hands and a tight chest. That’s really all you have to do.
But if it makes you feel better, you can throw in essential oils and salt. They won’t do anything, but I know you like to smell nice and make things complicated. Rules and steps and formulas can be so very comforting, after all. Light the trash can on fire using the match and that whole bottle of lighter fluid, for all I care.
Do what feels right.
Step Seven: Honestly, you don’t even need to do any of this, except the bit about bringing your deepest desire into the light. Don’t be afraid to look at it and feel it deep in your bones until it is a part of you again. And after that, well…
All you really need is an open road and a willingness to walk it.
Go on, then. What are you waiting for?
Alt Text: A brown parchment background with the text "Transformation Spell" and a cauldron emitting colorful lights.
Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational collection of musings touching on life’s simple pleasures, everyday fantasy, and absolutely 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 the everyday, subscribe here.
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