After a very powerful talk with a customer, I made this graphic, which I hope will inspire you and empower you.
The year is about to end, we are all facing stressful times, and if want to survive and thrive, we absolutely need to be the strongest that we can be, the most badass version of ourselves. And that cannot happen without loving ourselves first – be your own lover, your best friend, your partner, your parent; only you can give yourself what you truly need.
Through an entire year, I can take literally thousands of photographs. Between garden and wildharvesting documentation, spellwork and candle work reports for customers, and social media, there is hardly a day when I don’t use my camera.
For this post, I have selected my ten favourite pictures of my work through 2017, in no particular order. Enjoy the witchy eye candy!
1: Offering of herbal fumigation sticks, made using herbs from the garden. Most of them were offered in a Spiritual Service.
2: While cleaning the altar, a ray of evening light falls on the tiny Kwan Yinn statue.
3: One of the pictures taken for the Winter Rose Tonic post. Lavender, Marigold, Wild Rose, Lemon and Honey.
4: Making a batch of herbal powders for my Spellwork and Candle work. Each powder is made using over twenty ingredients, mostly herbs from our sacred garden, plus other magical elements like minerals, soil from sacred places, roots, seeds, etc.
5: A very special altar for the day of the Canary Islands, featuring the statue of the Guanche Goddess, shells and stones from places of power in the island, and two handmade cedar Chácaras (like castanets, but much bigger and rounder).
6: Consecrating an oil for anointing candles, for one of our Blessing Services.
7: An offering of wildharvested green figs and Catmint flowers from the garden.
8: Beautiful bottles for my magical oils – they deserve no less! Some purchased, some found, and one from a dearest friend.
9: Flower arrangement for my godchild’s birthday Henna party.
10: Image taken for the Objects Of Power post, of a cleansing and recharging session of energy for my healing gemstones.
The pictures I posted on yesterday’s post about Spirit dolls were taken at the studio table, which has great light for working, but is not the nicest setting to showcase the work done on this doll. So, today I did a little staging with shells, feathers, and one of my favourite silk scarves, and as you can see, this looks so much better – the early morning light was warm and perfect for the powerful colours of the clothing.
Now that the altar room has been repainted, and everything is back in its place, it’s time to make the room as beautiful and comfortable as possible for our Spiritual family, and the Ancestral Lines of our customers.
All these amulets were hanging around the house, doing their work :D, but this is something I’ve wanted to do for a while – to show them together as a collection in the altar room. Most of them were gifts, either from customers and friends around the world, or from Exu Okkada, so they all hold very special memories and meaning to me.
This is one of the most enjoyable of all my personal spiritual practises: making and giving away Holy Cards. They are scanned from my personal collection, and cut and laminated by hand; after making them, they get a special blessing from me and my Spirit Guides.
Once blessed, they are sent for free along orders, given to anyone I meet, or left in public places where they will be found easily. The point is to give them all away quickly and without any choosing about who will find them – because everyone, absolutely everyone, can take an extra blessing :).
Being an Espiritista is, first of all and above all, being a messenger of Grace, of the Blessing of Spirits. While I have absolutely no problem or shame with charging for my work, hope is something we must always give freely and abundantly, and I do all I can to give that hope to others – through these posts on my social media, through caring of our wildharvesting areas, and of course through these Holy Cards.
In the pic, the latest batch, finished just yesterday. Today, I invite you to think of ways to extend the Holy Grace to others, in a new way. And don’t forget – there is no such thing as a small gesture. If you had had the most horrible day, and found Yemanya’s loving face in your cafeteria’s table, a Holy Card peeking from under the serviette holder… would you see that as something small?
In the past few months, I’ve been posting little snippets of inspiration for my readers and social media followers. This post contains the first four, including a new one that was just created today – feel free to get them for personal use, and to share them (and the post itself) as you please!
My small collection of Guanche reproduction statues.
Today, May 30, it is the day of the Canary Islands. It is a holiday for the two Canarian provinces, and all over the seven islands there are Romerías (pilgrimages with parades and dances), Bailes De Magos (traditional folkloric dance shows), and celebrations at all levels. Although it is very early in the morning as I am writing this, I am sure the scent of barbeques all over our neighbourhood will begin to spread very soon.
For us, it is a day of communing with our Ancestors and our heritage. We are fiercely Canarian all year round, and honour our Ancestry almost daily, as all Espiritistas and Curanderos do – but still, today we take that extra step to celebrate with our spiritual family. Please allow me today to share a bit of ourselves with you.
A Brief Introduction To Our History
Canarians descend from the Guanches, the aboriginal inhabitants of the islands, which were of Amazigh Berber origin. The Spanish invaded the islands in the 15th century, enslaving and slaughtering thousands of Guanches. Although the invasion actually took two centuries because of the fierce resistance of the Guanches, in the 17th century the islands were finally part of Spain’s territories – during those two centuries, Guanches were stolen of their very existence and unique culture, forced to baptized into Christianity and speak Spanish, and became Canarians.
From there, Guanche history was erased from all areas of education and culture, and it still is an outlaw in many ways. It survived in folkloric traditions, and in the underground of society itself, as it always happens with colonized people. Craft and agricultural traditions, musical folklore, curanderismo, and our unique dialect*, still exist thanks to oral traditions, to the presence of the elderly in our families, and in syncretism with Christian practises and customs.
I have to say – even though we are extremely critical of any colonization, we are not Guanche reconstructionists, and we do not deny our identity as colonized people, because our direct Ancestors are part of it, and because we are too. It was my paternal grandmother, a devout Christian and totally patriotic Spanish lady, who inspired my love for Our Lady Of Candelaria, the colonized advocation of Guanche Goddess Chaxiraxi. So, I do not honour Spanish culture, but I do respect my own Ancestors’ traditions and life experience.
*Canarians speak Canarian, a dialect of Spanish and Guanche language that has been recently recognized as such by the Real Academia De La Lengua Española, the highest authority on the matter in Spain. We also speak with an entirely different accent to the rest of Spain.
Our Lady Of Candelaria, Patroness of Canarians.
Our Traditions On This Day
To be completely honest, this day is not really so different from our everyday life, because of the work I do, and because we do make a conscious effort on preserving our culture all year round. Today, we are only slightly more Canarian than we are the rest of the year :D.
Since I work mostly with international customers, I don’t take the day off, but after my work is finished, we prepare to enjoy the day with our Spiritual family. Of course, the first step is to cleanse our home, physically and spiritually. We will be receiving the visit of our Spirit family, and we want them to be happy and proud. After the regular cleaning, the house is cleansed with herbal incense smoke, and blessed with Holy Water.
The altar, of course, gets candles all day, and simple offerings of fresh water, incense or herbs. The celebration is not closed only to our biological Ancestry, so all the entities we work with are invited to participate in an informal way. Most will visit briefly to give their blessing along the day.
Canarian food will definitely be on the menu: today, it will be Puchero Canario, which is a dish of stewed vegetables and meat that we both love. Again, not so different from any other day, because we make this dish very often, since it’s so tasty and healthy – but today, our Ancestors get served at the table, instead of at the altar, and share the meal with us.
Without a fail, we eat gofio, a toasted flour made with many different grains that is absolutely essential to our gastronomy and culture. Since gofio is already toasted prior to grinding it, it does not need to be cooked, so it’s usually kneaded into soft balls with honey and milk, and eaten that way along any kind of dish, or by itself. It’s filled with nutrients (vitamins, fiber and minerals aplenty), so it’s usually part of a power breakfast, or eaten as a snack through the day.
It is very likely that the day will end in the garden, burning some herbs in the barbeque. Although this is not a Canarian tradition at all, I am a Bruja, and I love Burning Stuff Magic :D. Herbs of cleansing and protection are used to keep negative entities and energies away from our home and our neighbourhood – Rosemary, Rue, Wormwood, Moorish Sage, and Canarian Juniper will be the most likely options.
In all, it is a happy and relaxed day with family, that celebrates who we are, and who we can become. I sincerely hope you enjoyed this post – here’s a short documentary about Tenerife, my island, that showcases the most beautiful cities and landscapes. It’s in English, so all readers can enjoy it!
After a morning epiphany during my meditation time, I worked my witchy ass off all day to give a huge turnaround at my art website. I realized that since I see no difference between the many manifestations of my art, and that I believe them all to come from the same source, they should all share the same space, and the same importance. I invite you to visit it, and enjoy the new galleries – plenty of magical, herbal, artsy eye candy!
January is the greenest, most beautiful month of the year when it comes to our tiny islands. This year, after an unexpected (but deeply grateful for) very rainy autumn, Winter has started cold (by our standards :D ), sunny, and totally delicious.
The places where we wildharvest regularly become our gardens, our adopted areas; we know every tree that grows there, when they flower and seed, and when they are not to be cut. Many of the older trees hold very powerful Spirits, and they have become our friends through each visit, each offering, each time we clean the place from trash. We see seasonal plants come and go with the year, rejoicing by their return every single time. We are as attached to these places as if we owned them, and when civilization ends with them, our heart will be broken. So, what you are looking at is not only pictures of pretty things – it’s our green family :). Enjoy!
Hibiscus (above) and Bird Of Paradise/Strelitzia (below) are in full bloom during this season.
Gorgeous moss textures on the bark of a bottle tree (Adansonia Genus, Baobab).
Canarian Ivy (Hedera Canariensis) growing over a Pepper Tree (Schinus Molle).
The Canarian Palm tree (Phoenix Canariensis) is giving fruit abundantly – only animals eat their dates, but the sap that is taken from the crown of the tree is the origin of the Canarian Palm Honey, one of the most delicious relics of Canarian cuisine, and sadly a disappearing tradition.
Inside the branches of one of my “adopted” Dragon’s Blood Trees. This one is actually the biological mother of the one I grew from seed, and that lives in our garden.
And finally, my beloved Juniper trees. These five trees grow around a well that is centuries old, and are the home to several families of blackbirds, so they are quite magical indeed.
