This piece came out fully-formed during a session of dear friend Jen Violi’s course Elemental Writing: Bearing Fruit. A gift of time and holding space. Check out her offerings here.
How to Make a Protection Charm: From Without, From Within
Cull together all the learnings from all your days and all your breaths.
Tune into what you’ve already learned in this lifetime about what makes you feel safe as well as what imperils you.
Think back on the times that you had your boundaries crossed or crossed others’ boundaries. Feel into the feeling of loss, of what made you feel as if someone came into your body with muddy shoes.
Remember the times you felt strong.
How did you feel in your body? What were you wearing? Where were you standing? Who was there or were you alone? What were you listening to? The wind? The rain? Your favorite song? Where were your arms: by your side? across your chest? holding your heart? What occupied the space with you? The scent of lavender? Talismans from loved ones? Tarot decks? Your books and journals? Your favorite cup of tea?
To make a protection charm, you can make of any object a vessel. You can make any space a place of refuge. It is both in the specifics and the abstract. You can want one singular thing to hold and you can use anything.
Prioritize your imagination above all else. Tell your creativity that you are here not only for the shouts, but the whispers. Carve out times when you will show up and listen. And pause as you go about your day. She isn’t as elusive as she’s been made out to be. She is always inside you. She is of you. You are made of the same matter. You are of the same body (of work, of art, of stone, water, sinew).
To make a protection charm, build around yourself a barricade of words to banish the stories of not enough, the doubts that others cast in your direction, the harshness directed at you, the rejection that comes with the territory. Those words are a growing vocabulary that rings true in every part of your body. They are willful and determined and lock arms around you. They say their names aloud: “enough” and “brazen” and “freedom.” They form themselves into phrases: “it matters to me” and “ what they think is not my business” and “here, we can write a new story.” They are a choir in cacophony. They brandish all your favorite sounds. They remind you of who you are and can be. They are, together, the agency that reminds you to pick up your pen.
Inside the protection charm is the essence of the language that only you can make. Not because you are more special than anyone else, but because everyone is special. Because everyone is made up of a unique encyclopedia compiled through every experience they’ve ever had and every person they’ve ever known, everything they’ve ever learned, and every single thing their heart knows to be true. This essence is already here, existing inside you, and the charm allows it to thrive, contained and uncontainable at once.
To make a protection charm, you must remember that the charm is constantly calling for renovations in ways that support the you of this moment, and then this one. And so you can hold the charm to the light for the cracks that need to be filled in with gold. You can ask the charm what it wants next so that you might offer into the world the writing that you know you must offer and so that you might remember the beauty of what it is to pull down this language from ether, from nothing, from everything.
Optional prompt: Feel like writing?
Write your own how-to burst. Some ideas:
How to rest inside the quiet
How to learn your own name
How to build using only what is in front of you
How to unearth what is true
How to make peace with the distant sounds inside you