cowrie shell spell for what i want to do with my life | the hanged one | future self

I made this spell years ago, alone at my dining room table with a candle and a bottle of wine. The wine was Sangre de Toro, aka Blood of the Bull. I remember my parents drinking it when I was a child because I loved the small plastic bull that came strung around the neck of the bottle.

The cowrie shell is a childhood memory too - my mom had one tucked up on top of the bookshelf that lined the hallway leading from my bedroom to the kitchen. After a bath my dad would carry me on his shoulders while I examined all the objects on the shelves, delighting in the stories I imagined they contained. The cowrie shell always felt like a piece of special magic. I imagined my mom finding it on some sun-speckled beach long before I was born and carrying it with her for years before it ended up on the bookshelf in the hallway in this house with the tin roof that I was raised in.

In this spell I wrote down everything I want to do with my life on little scraps of the previous years' calendar. I folded the pieces of paper up into tiny little paper sculptures and nested them in the shell, along with scraps of sage and lavender for calm, clear purpose, a rattlesnake rattle for protection and luck, and the plastic bull from my bottle of Sangre de Toro as a token of bullish determination and childlike wonder.

I opened it up 2 years later and reviewed it all by candlelight. I drew a card from my Mexican loteria deck and unpacked some spools of thread from my grandmother's boxes. La Chalupa is the canoe. "Lupita rows as she may, sitting in her little boat" is the associated riddle. She reminds me of the Empress in the tarot - her boat is overflowing with abundance and she flows with the river, her beauty and power in harmony with nature. My intentions from years ago hold up as guiding principles. The dinosaur bone and the coral remind me that my life is brief and its meaning is in its interconnectedness with the world.