I have felt a bit of a fraud lately. While those around me have been making gris-gris and big mojo, I've been pottering in the kitchen making biscuits and cutting shapes from occult play-doh. Don't get me wrong, I've had a fantastic time doing it, but I have started to question my magical credentials.
Even as I spin my spindle on the train each morning I have been trying to make the pieces of my new Practical Magic lifestyle fit together. All I really knew when I started was that spinning was an essential outlet in a time of change. It was meditative, absorbing, and productive. When I spin I only have half an eye on the real world, and sometimes that really is all you want to see of it.
For example, yesterday I caught the Orient Express to work. Oh, only as far as Wimbledon, but it was far enough. When the train drew into my station it was different than normal, and my carriage was fitted with half-moon seats, arranged in an open almost 1960s style. As I started my spinning I could overhear a swarthy man barking Russian into his mobile phone. It rang again - a lilting Baltic accordion tune - and he barked more Russian, "Da...Da...". I glanced up and behind him saw only passing trees and a greying sky, and suddenly I was a Babushka, drafting wool against my heavy denim skirt and spinning quietly. When he got off at the next station, as if to complete the illusion a young couple took his seat and sat, hand in hand, speaking Russian softly to each other too.... but when I put my spindle away the spell was broken. As I looked up, alert again, I read an English headline, heard an English voice, recognised my station though the window.
When I spin my spindle, as my mind relaxes and focuses on the rhythmic pull and drop, pull and drop, I sense a shift and my version of reality softens. In this state I can spin the chanting of a voodoo priest into my yarn and know that while the whorl spins the energy is channelled away and stored, only to be released when the spindle drops. No wonder then that spinners say they spin their dreams.
