Title: Everyday Enchantments: Musings on Ordinary Magic & Daily Conjurings
Author: Maria DeBlassie
Genre: New Age
Book Blurb:
Winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award in the New Age Category for 2018
Finalist for the Body Mind Spirit Book Awards in the New Age Category for 2018
Official Selection for the New Apple Book Award for the New Age/Mind-Body-Spirit Category for 2018
Finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award in the Body Mind Spirit Category for 2018
Spellbinding meditations on conjuring your own bliss.
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. It was inspired by the author's own journey back to a happy, healthy, whole self.
DeBlassie committed to a year of daily blogging on simple pleasures, everyday magic, and those quiet mystic moments inherent in our lives...that turned into a lifestyle, an ongoing blog, and this book!
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.
Everyday Enchantments 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.
Excerpt:
Everyday Enchantment
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 down 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 lesson 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 working 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 consonants 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 others 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 potential of seconds and minutes and hours unfurling into vines and roots. Because when you are looking 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 reflected 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 moonlight. 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.
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If you could dress up as anything or anyone this Halloween, what or who would it be and why?
I would dress up as a witch—complete with my new black kitten, Smoke, as my familiar. One of my favorite costumes I ever wore as a child was this beautiful black witch dress and hat with gold stars on them made by my mother. My sisters and I went as a trio of witchy women, or brujas, as we say in New Mexico. We looked fabulous and I remember feeling so cool. In fact, I think I wore that starry outfit around as dress-up even when it wasn’t Halloween! I think that’s where my love of all things witchy and magical started.
Explain why your featured book is a treat to read:
Everyday Enchantments is the perfect book to read when you need to brush the dust off your soul and remember that you are a magical being full of an infinite capacity for joy. Gab a cup of apple spice tea, a cozy blanket, and snuggle in for an afternoon of reading enchanting meditations on the magic of everyday life!
Giveaway:
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Open internationally
Runs October 1 – 31
Drawing will be held on November 1.
Author Biography:
Maria DeBlassie, Ph.D. is a native New Mexican mestiza blogger, multi-award-winning writer, and multi-award-winning 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.
Social Media Links:
Twitter: @enchantmentll
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mdeblassie.writer