Stephanie's Studio

Magick and great ashe stems from engagement with plants. Over the years I've come to regard them as a reservoir of healing, font of wisdom and source of creativity. Healing with plants is an important facet of holistic health. Herbs are quite capable of gracing the mind, body and spirit with age-old energetic insights that lead to wellness. I've written a good handful, maybe more, of posts about gardening. Gardening as a pastime, a pleasure, a metaphor and a space for cultivating hopes and dreams. Do you remember when I shared the post  Seeding the Snow ? That was in March and I was so relieved that spring was actually going to show its face after a long, hard Chicago winter. Still, winter was unrelenting so it seemed as though you'd have to plant in the snow. The snow didn't want to make an exit. Then there was this post called  Weeding , which focuses around the activity of gardening as a form of mind/body/spirit therapy. When I wrote "Weeding" I was s...

I’ve written a lot about transformation during the past year because I started working on that journey seriously in January. Yesterday I went shopping. It was an eye opener. After having lost 45 pounds, I found that my former haunts were no longer mine. Over the years I had gotten so accustomed to being a certain size and shape that automatically when shopping I gravitated towards the same sort of clothing. Yesterday, I had to redirect myself away from the XL clothes, which would have bagged and dragged along after me. Instead, I headed to the size mediums—a huge breakthrough for me. In my past with the XL’s, my main goal was to find what covered me up the best. In some instances I had pushed past XL to a size XXL, so there was also a challenge to figure out which size I could actually fit. Generally at the XXL sixe, I would just leave the store to go find a store specializing in vanity sizing, wherein I could fit an XL. Now I’m no longer engaged in that sort of inner conflict. St...

In "The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets," Barbara Walker says ancients believed any reflective surface, solid or liquid had mystical powers because the reflection is a part of the soul. Hence, soulless beings like werewolves and vampires, show no reflection in the mirror. The mirror is connected intimately to water, through the story of Narcissus and Echo. Various water orisha wouldn't be caught dead without their mirrors. Across cultures, water represents a mysterious spirit world. Walker closes her beautiful entry on mirrors sharing some Buddhist thoughts on reflections in the mirror; the belief that reflected images are a phantom of the mind. For the past few years, or realistically to be honest, the better part of the last decade I have avoided the magical mirror on the wall. Lately though, I have been catching glimpses when I go by the mirror that intrigue me so much that they have entered the landscape of my dreams. The other night, I saw an ...