The Everyday Lore Project

22 May 2020 – Message In A Bottle

22 May 2020 – Message In A Bottle

Today I set my message in a bottle free. My only interim instruction had been to focus on my secret desire every day to help it manifest. The first two days were fine as it was in my eye line while watching my beans grow working, but today I had to venture out to get me some cat litter. So before completing the charm, I decided to give it some concentrated attention. And when I say give it some concentrated attention, I mean I put on Superstition by Stevie Wonder and danced it out. 

So after three songs, releasing my wish into the universe involved holding my bottle (or in this case, my pickle jar), intoning a badly scanning but very well meaning quatrain, extracting the message (releasing a heady waft of pickle juice), and then laying the paper on my altar. Except I hadn’t really paid attention to the altar bit, so I sequestered the side table I’ve been using to store my folklore prop overflow. By now the music had moved onto Earth, Wind and Fire’s Fantasy, so while I’ve often found these charms to be anticlimactic, I was so thrown off my message-out-of-a-bottle game, and back onto dancing, that I can’t say I really noticed. However, my note has since been transformed into a bookmark.

I have a slight suspicion that I may have botched this one. Unless my secret desire was actually just to dance all night.


Resources

Neff, A. (ed) (2019) Llewellyn’s 2020 Witches’ Spell-A-Day Almanac, Holidays & Lore, Spells, Rituals & Meditations, Woodbury, MN, Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Published by Liza Frank

Author of My Celebrity Boyfriend. Obsessed with hula hooping, sons of preachermen and fresh dates, sometimes all at the same time. Curator of Folklore Agony and The Everyday Lore Project.

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