New Age, Inspirational Non-Fiction
Date Published: October 26, 2018
Publisher: Moon Books
Winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award in the New Age Category for 2018!
Everyday Enchantments is a love letter to the magic of everyday life, the sweet moments and the profound that we often overlook in our hurry to get from one place to the next. What if we had the power to unplug from our daily hustle and bustle and conjure a more profound way of living rooted in natural mysticism?
We do. All it takes is the whispered wish for more everyday enchantment breathed onto a dandelion head. This collection of essays reminds us to escape into the ordinary, find beauty in a simple cup of tea or rereading a beloved novel—and joyfully let our world turn upside down when synchronicity strikes in the form of wrong turns down forgotten lanes and unexpected midnight conversations with the moon.
This book is a study in what it means to live deliciously, joyfully, and magically. And it’s an invitation to conjure your own bliss—-because let’s face it: we could all use a little more magic in our lives.
ENCHANTMENT: A spell wrapped in a
noun. Three syllables. One state of being.
To live with Enchantment is to see beyond the brick and mortar that make up your home and into the magic infused within
its frame. It is made up
of stories and dried bay leaves
and dreams whispered into the heads
of dandelions. Of bare feet on
carpeted floors and the smell of
burning sage. Crystals—amethyst, citrine, amazonite, smoky quartz—winding in and around your books; all the better
to magnify their magic. It is to peel back the layers
of your day-to-day and search for that
elusive energy that winds its way up
your spine and outward into your life. Let the snake at your
base wriggle free of its coil to climb up
to your shoulder blades
and across
your open back.
There is no room
for tightly stacked discs
here, just the taste of joy
when the sun licks your skin.
You might find it at the bottom
of an empty teacup.
Your future written
in soggy leaves, or in the whisper of trees,
their leaves rustling
and murmuring secrets
only they can understand.
Sometimes they are kind enough
to translate for you—if you listen long enough. If you shower their roots with distilled love songs and feed them the black earth from your compost. It’s there, too, when you run your
tongue along the grooves and ridges of a well-loved sentence. It’s everywhere. Even in the spaces you think
have lost hope,
like the junk drawer where you
keep
your faded dreams,
stray screws, and half-forgotten heartbreaks along with wine corks and a few rubber bands. They’re not lost, just resting like seeds in the earth before they are ready
to break open.
That is the first syllable.
The second is to learn from Enchantment, to listen to Coyote's call when he plays his tricks. Coyote loves his tricks. And you should too. What delicious messages wrapped in matted
fur and a lolling tongue! All he wants is for you to take that leap of
faith when only you can see the
soft earth on the
other side of the
cliff. Don’t you know that you have wings? They are just rusty from disuse. Just listen to Coyote’s long-winded stories
(he does so admire himself) and watch the flick of his
tail. All he asks is for
you to trust him, even if he can’t be trusted; his les-
son is real, hard as onyx in
your palm, ephemeral as the desert
rain that you feel
in your bones when all you
see is a cloudless sky.
No weatherman can ever map the storms and sunshine work- ing
their way across
your body.
Coyote has no room for logic, just the reason
in his unreason.
Just those perfect coincidences set in motion
by the padding of his
paws. You are raw power, he says, a spark of the universe
set in motion. And you
must trust this power that is you, that is the earth,
that is the beating of your heart. A rhythmic tattoo
forever pounding out your
path, however many times you try
to stray from it. All Enchantment asks is that you
absorb the wisdom of the
moon and the stars, and the prophesying of the seeds burrowed
deep in the dirt.
Coyote is there to make sure you listen, even when the rest of the
world prefers your ears stopped with cotton and your
heart beating as slow as melting snow in
winter.
And
the third syllable? To conjure. Here you
weave your spell with vowels and conso-
nants and beeswax candles. You
seal them with pure starlight
and a handful of
chamomile. Then you burn away the dry
brush and the brittle ideas that don’t hold up against the moonlight. There is
no room here for literal…things or the people who think them.
Not if you want to create.
Not
if you want
to believe that the most important part of
your everyday occurs in the moments
oth- ers can too easily overlook. (Seldom can you find
a person strong
enough to brave
the stillness or wade
into the bottomless waters of
imagination.) You make your life here, in the infinite poten- tial of seconds and minutes
and hours unfurling into vines and roots. Because
when you are look- ing for everyday enchantment, it finds you. Always. And if you
let it, it will settle inside your skin
and feed your soul with dreams
grown ripe under the sun’s caress. It drops you deep down into the rich earth and forgotten caves buried between
heartbeats—places that many are too
afraid to venture inside.
For how can you absorb the marvelous, if you
do not recognize it re-
flected in yourself, feel it settle in your
bones like so much calcium?
That's Enchantment.
A three-syllable spell wrapped in a noun, planted in the earth and nourished with moon- light. Let the roots stretch to the underworld and the leaves
unfurl toward the heavens. Walk
across the star-kissed bridge
made of hollyhock seeds and strong
will. There is your
passage into the unseen
universe.
About the Author
Maria DeBlassie, Ph.D. is a native New Mexican mestiza blogger, award-winning writer, and educator living in the Land of Enchantment. Her blogging life started as a year-long journey to write her back into happy, healthy, and whole through daily posts about life’s simple pleasures, everyday magic, and radical self-care. That year-long experiment turned into a lifestyle, a book, a press—and her ongoing blog, Enchantment Learning & Living. She is forever looking for magic in her life and somehow always finding more than she thought was there. Find out more about Maria and conjuring everyday magic at www.mariadeblassie.com.
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Thank you so much for featuring my book on your blog! Here's to everyday magic!
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