The Radical Power of Whimsy

When I was a young girl, it was common practice to leave out offerings to the faeries. 

I grew up reading fairytales and the works of Brian Froud, and between those and Tolkien’s The Hobbit, I was convinced that the world was rather more magical than we gave it credit for. In fact, I firmly believed that we lived in our very own Shire. And yes, I did spend a summer trying to toughen my skin so I could have thick hobbit feet—who needs shoes?

My younger sister and I built gorgeous, rustic gnome houses in our bedrooms that ran across our bookshelves and looked very cozy, indeed. She, an artist even then, built glorious fairy homes in the garden with nothing but mud, sticks, and her imagination. We would dance out under the stars in the summer and look for magical creatures beneath every flower head and under every rock. We left offerings—sticks, feathers, pistachio shells—to whatever spirits lived in the wild wood of our family garden. My other siblings and I spent afternoons figuring out the right consistency between water and dirt for the perfect mud pie, or listening to our mother explain that some plants could be turned into tea.

In other words, dear readers, I grew up in a home of magic and whimsy.

These things were just as important as learning the practical skills of reading and cleaning house, knowing basic math, and mowing the lawn. A well-balanced life comes from the grounded energy of our daily work and studies—and a healthy respect for the ephemeral, joyous things that make life magical.

It took me a long time to realize that not everyone was raised this way. You didn’t grow up making fairy houses and looking for gnomes in your garden? You didn’t make potions out of sticks and torn-up plants? You didn’t count the many crows nesting in your neighbor’s tree and wonder at what secrets they kept?

How sad!

It seems a terrible thing to have no sense of whimsy. How does one cope with the difficulties of life without it? How does one figure out what is right and beautiful and wonderful without it? Some things I will never know—or understand.

As I’ve aged, I’ve brought this sense of magic into my life and into my home. It’s literally all I write about! Well, that and its twin flame: the gothic (and, of course, whimsigothic). But I’ve noticed, particularly when times are hard, that I return to whimsy to soothe my soul.

I’ve found refuge in decorating my home for spring. Wildflowers on the mantle. Rose-strewn linens on my bed. A tablecloth speckled with garden motifs. I sip chamomile tea from mugs dotted with strawberries as I swan around the house in an oversized kimono, sweeping away the dust of winter and ushering in good intentions for the warmer seasons.

I fill my patio garden with as many brightly colored plants and fresh herbs as I can—to welcome the fae folk, of course, and honor the medicine each green, growing thing offers.

Later, I eat olives from a tiny plate painted with lemons, while sipping wine from a pink wineglass I found at a vintage store, and paint my nails a sparkling lilac to match the flirty flowers that bring me joy this time of year.

My wardrobe, too, looks like something out of a fairytale, or as someone once told me, “just how I thought a bruja professor would dress.” Velvets. Soft patterns and rich jewel-tone colors. Scarves aplenty. Jewels and perfumes and many lovely things to soothe the senses.

I knit blankets so large and long they border on absurd… and a touch enchanted. I gather herbs from my garden to craft medicinal salads and tisanes, as any kitchen witch worth her salt should.

Whimsy, in other words, is alive and well in my life.

I even find touches of it in my classroom. This semester, we read Beverly Jenkins’ Forbidden, a personal favorite of mine, in my historical romance class. I can never read this book without craving marmalade. I told this to my students and discovered many of them had never had marmalade. So I did the only thing any sensible educator should do and threw a marmalade party.

We ate shortbread cookies and dark chocolate slathered in marmalade and drank lemonade (because Rhine goes shopping for lemons for lemonade and runs into Eddy buying oranges for marmalade), all while discussing the symbolism of this jam in Jenkins’ novel. It then led to a powerful student discussion about the politics of passing in this romance and how it affected us, as the majority of my students, like myself, are white-passing or have an othered identity that isn’t always visible. The conversation was frank, open, and generous about the various marginalized identities the majority of us carry inside us.

Whimsy, in this instance, became a vehicle for community building and talking about difficult topics in an open and curious way. Like Eddy’s marmalade in Forbidden, we took what might be an often discarded conversation and turned it into something fruitful and delicious.

I found it again in a new collaboration with my fellow book witches of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic. Sara and Brittany are working on a fantastic new course, Me & The Moon: The Folklore of Tarot, and I’ll be offering a workshop titled The Cards That Choose Us: Tarot and Personal Story Making. It’s about affinity cards, or the cards that keep coming back time after time and have special medicine for us. Now, I didn’t tell Sara and Brittany that my affinity card is the Queen of Wands… until they rolled out their free tarot workshop on exploring folklore and fairytale through the cards. Guess what it was called? The Queen of Wands! Of course this queen would speak to my fellow witches as much as she did to me. It was a lovely bout of synchronicity that filled my heart with joy.

The message was clear: Magic is afoot!

Even my social media algorithms know I love magical living, because I am inundated with reels and images about the importance of whimsy. I’m not mad about it.

Whimsy is a way of life that allows for hope and magic, even in dark times. It’s a way of creating space for joy and ease, even when life gets hard. It’s also a way to push back against consumerist culture and the daily grind that says we are only worth as much as we produce.

Yeah, whimsy is political. Especially for those of us with marginalized identities. Joy is the first thing the system tries to take from us. Cultivating wonder and delight protects us from the horrors of systemic oppression. Better still—it helps us dismantle it.

And that’s why whimsy is sacred.

It nourishes us. It fuels us. It allows us to dream bigger and find wonder in the most mundane of circumstances. It connects us to something deeper than ourselves—the natural world, the universe, the ephemeral luminosity that surrounds us.

So here, on the eve of Beltane, I invite you to flirt with whimsy. Dance under the flower moon. Wear flowers in your hair. Leave out offerings to the fair folk. Allow yourself to be more than burdens and heartache.

Leave the door open for joy, magic, and delight.

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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What To Do When You Feel Small…

Go big. Unfurl and take up all the space you can, like a seed cracking open and spreading ragged roots into the earth and green tendrils to the sky. Be loud like the morning finch — he may be tiny, but he has a voice that can reach the heavens and a golden chest filled with sunlight. 

Don’t be afraid of what your song can do.

And when you are no longer scared of a pair of air-filled lungs and the spell they breath to life, go bigger than that.

Spread your arms wide and hold the Universe close. Find your story in the constellations that map our histories — what was, what is, what will be. Surely, your fate is written somewhere between the Big and Little Dippers. You have to become a giant if you want to reach those pin-pricks of light. They may have the answers you need, so you must risk expansiveness.

But that’s the catch: Sometimes your body has forgotten how to stretch.

What do you do then?

If you don’t know how to go big, go even smaller than you feel, so far inside yourself that you forget the outside world and instead make your home inside a four-chambered heart — don’t leave until you remember what it means to be a living, breathing being. Find yourself in the thump-thump of muscle and wet walls squeezing you tight.

When you feel even smaller than that, talk to the smallest thing you know. I asked a ladybug once how she felt about being no bigger than a sunflower seed. She just opened her polka-dotted wings and took flight. I knew what she was saying. She might be small, but she is red and fierce, and everyone knows who she is when she lands on their fingertips. You’d think she was being snippy, but I knew she was just stating a fact. Not that she cared much, either, if she were mistaken for a button or a bead. Her hard-shelled wings protected her from the inhumanity of indifference.

I talked to an elephant once, too, just to understand what it meant to be big. He didn’t seem to know he was a giant of an animal. By elephant standards, he was medium-sized, and, well, he didn’t spend much time thinking about those things when he could fill his mind with peanuts and hay and stories everyone else forgot. 

Those lost memories were so powerful, he told me, so much larger than him that it didn’t much matter what size he was. I told him he might think he wasn’t much to look at, but he sure had big, beautiful ears, and he blushed at that. I knew he wouldn’t forget me, the same way I knew I’d always remember the time I made an elephant’s cheeks go red. 

In fact, that average elephant with his gloriously large ears got me thinking about all the things I’d overlooked, all the things I’d never taken the time to listen to. So I spent some time with forgotten things and, though my ears are no bigger than tulip heads, I let them take in the whispers and quiet songs of the things we fail to notice as we go about life.

Take the plant called borage. An uncharitable name for a starflower. Does she care? Does it stop her from blooming violet and yellow flowers and making the earth around her sing with life? The bees don’t forget her, even if others can’t name her by sight. The hummingbird can’t get enough of her nectar, and so she makes more and more for him, eager to feel his tongue against her petals. There is beauty in the forgotten. Such freedom in being overlooked. So many things you can say and do when you learn the art of invisibility. Without it, she would have never known the hummingbird’s kiss.

So long as you know how to find yourself, she tells me, that is all that matters. So long as you give your attention to those who deserve it. Where do you think all her nectar comes from? The bees and the hummingbird fill her with pollen and the sky showers her in sunlight. It is their secret dance and it is enough that only they share it.

To everyone else, she is just another plant. To them? Divinity. 

She plucks one of her violet flowers from her green, furry body and presses it against my tongue. I am grateful for her story and suddenly feel full and sweet. I wondered if this is how she feels when the bees settle in her center.

That night, I dreamt I found the constellation with my story written across it. It was like looking into the bottom of a star-speckled well or the inside of an apple. That’s all I can tell you — the rest is between me and the stars. And the violet flower coating the roof of my mouth. 

Secrets, I’m learning, those private, quiet things, can be quite delicious. 

One day, I stopped talking. Stopped asking questions. Stopped wondering how to quit feeling small and even gave up trying to change my size altogether. Instead, I let the silence fill up the space around me. I let the world around me grow large and full and technicolor.

I watched two black cats sprawled across a windowsill, tails lazily flicking back and forth. Noticed how they took up all the space they wanted, just like the silence. They would not consider themselves small. They would not stuff themselves into bad-luck labels, even if they did like stuffing themselves into boxes. They, like all sensible creatures, favor big hearts over small minds. They know you are lucky to bask in their presence. 

And, somehow, they are right.

Now, I no longer think of myself as small. I am not confined by this skin or the pain others might press upon it. I am breath and heartbeat and the red blush of a ladybug’s kiss on my fingertip. I am the conversation with an elephant. The starflower in my mouth. The cats watching me write. I am not small, though I take up little space.

I am all the ways I touched the world just by being myself. 

I am one word after another, spilling from my mouth, my pen, my heart. 

I am the words I cannot speak. 

I am the stories that have made me feel small, and I am the stories I will write to remember that I am big. I am the spaces — they get bigger and longer each time I feed them — when I forget to think about my place in the world and simply listen to the morning finch. 

That bird.

He knows how to give me wings. He knows how to fill my chest with sunlight. I put down my pen and open the window above my writing desk to let his birdsong wash over me.  In the end, this is all that matters:

His brilliant voice.

The big sky above us.

This small moment.

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.

Want even more inspiration to make your dream life a reality?  Follow me on Facebook, Pinterest, and  Instagram.  Thanks for following!