30 Seconds Past 11:11pm

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Make a wish.

What sort of little superstitious things do you guys frequently adhere to?

One of mine has always been wishing at 11:11pm if I catch it. The wishes come true, generally. Or at least if they don't, there's another reason why not that makes itself obvious shortly thereafter.
Another is what happens when somebody says the opposite of what they would prefer would happen -- for instance, "You'll do well on your final!" "Nah, man...with my luck, I'd fail."
After the person laughs and finishes their sentence, you are supposed to knock on wood to dispell the bad luck. Mostly because words are powerful and when you say them, they cannot be taken back. Those are the two I follow all the time and notice myself acknowledging.

Back to the part about "words are powerful."

Without them, there can still be magic and spells. But are those spells as powerful as ones spoken aloud? What about spells written on paper? Are poems a form of magic? (Don't ask a poet. They say one thing but believe another and mean something entirely different. Speaking from experience here...I am a poet. Or I consider myself one anyway.)

Spell construction tends to be a tricky subject amongs many of us. I know there are a ton of books with very beautifully written spells in there. Then, there are those of us who learn from our teachers or family members different spells and keep those exact words. I find that magic is generally going to be about will and intent. Personally, I think spells are best written with words that mean something to you. So yeah, in my case poetry is magic, too. And, being that it is my personality type, not speaking the words of a spell out loud and instead focusing on them as symbols in my mind's eye works too. Not to say that I never speak the words of a spell. Sometimes that is necessary.

The last one I spoke aloud was a calming and protection spell for my mom's conure, Cookie -- who was inherited. Her care is kind of a new endeavor, and sometimes, being that her original owner is gone, she can get mean towards anyone who is not that person. I did the same spell for the other inherited bird, Link the lovebird, as he is afraid of hands and also to come out of the cage.

The spell bottles

 So, for Cookie, I took one of her molted feathers that floated down off of her leg as she was preening and put it in a tiny glass bottle. I corked it and cleansed it with a drop of handmade florida water from The Fey Dragon. After that, I hung on to it (along with the personal items filled with my own energy, pictured above,) and said this three times while visualizing a happy, healthy conure singing, not screaming:

For the bird from whom this feather fell --
find calm, find peace, find quiet.

After that, I brought the spell bottle back into the room and repeated the words over her cage three times. (She, of course, made the usual conure sing/snort noises and was entirely too cute and calm thereafter.) Then, put the bottle on my altar. Sometimes the most effective spells aren't a big to-do. Sometimes. I think the more specific you are, the better -- but that also depends on visualization. It's hard to put to words exactly what your mind is envisioning -- on the rare occasion. Combine words with mental imagery in order to make clear the intent.

So that spell? Did it work? Of course it did. She "screamed" and "attacked" but once since then. (And in her defense, she bit one of the cats in the ass. It was the cat's fault -- she snuck in while the bird was out and singing to Mom and pissed the one with the sharp beak off, really... Not so smart on the cat's part.) She is usually very mean to my Dad, even when he's not in the room with her. It's a territorial issue. Dad cleans the cages, you see. Granted, he hasn't been in there with her out of the cage yet, but she used to get worked up if he was just in her line of vision outside of the door while she was in her cage. So far, she's just been talkative. She hasn't screamed her beak off at him recently. We'll see if the spell can completely make her calm, or just reduce the number of times stress negatively affects her behavior.

So how does any of that have anything to do with 11:11pm? Wishes and Spells are not so different. Will and intent are both present. One believes that an outside source by itself will bring the result, while the other takes sources both without and within to bring about results.