Charms for the Cottage Life

Art by Thistlemoon

Autumn brings crisp temperatures to invigorate and inspire your suddenly homebody self. While you’re hunkering down and cozying up for the season, you might also be reading more, exercising with new vigor, and giving your home a good clean and your wardrobe a makeover. This autumn is about renewal—with appreciation for the past that has given you strong foundations. Nothing is as important now as protecting the emotional and spiritual integrity of your special space, which is the best way to ensure that creativity and happiness will also be at home with you. Here are some cottage-friendly ways to make your place even homier.

• This one is a classic for a reason: Upon moving into a new home, or anytime you feel an odd and unwelcome presence in your place, try smudging it to cleanse the energy. Whether you burn incense, bay leaves, sage, or a green wax candle, you’ll take in good energy along with the heavenly aroma. Of course you’ll do it with all respect for the long tradition each item carries with it—the best way to connect with people of the past. As a bonus, many smudgeable substances (such as green candles and peppermint incense) enhance creativity.

• To gather a community of lives and hearts with wisdom and goodwill from the past, fill your space with secondhand objects of art and sentimental significance. If you’ve inherited ancestral pieces from your family, lucky you! You might also have had your eye on a beautiful art nouveau lamp at a nice antique store, or maybe the local thrift store offers some great deco dishes and cast-iron candlesticks at a dollar apiece. You don’t have to spend a ton. A flea-market find will work just as well as a major auction purchase to plug you into the passions and ideas of the other people who have used those objects before. When you eat from those plates, you sit down with a nice big company of fellow diners. And when you’re done with the fabulous time-traveling object, you can pass it on to someone else who needs the connection.
• Another classic is this warding spell used all over Europe. Use black rock salt or sea salt to make a line across the doorway. For added strength, try chanting, “Disappear, disappear; you are not welcome here.”
• Nothing says cottage couture like homespun fabrics woven with colored threads (as opposed to fabrics printed with color later on). Because it’s dyed in the wool or in the cotton, homespun promotes truth telling and honest interactions.
• Then again, we love velvet. No other fabric is so soft and elegantly cozy. It also has a unique relationship to light—rippling under a fickle light source, soaking up light when the nap (the fuzzy bits) runs one way, reflecting a lush shimmer when you reverse direction. Even the simplest of cottages has room for a bit of velvet in a beautiful color.
• The use of a horseshoe as a home mascot goes back to ancient Egypt, where the crescent shape was associated with Isis, goddess of magic, healing, fertility, and so many other good things. Just about everywhere except China, horseshoes are talismans bringing good luck and good health to a home. You can nail one up over a door, or bury one at the roots of an ash tree; just be sure to hang it so the U shape keeps the benefits from spilling out. If you’re in Bermuda and you feel a malevolent witch approaching your home, thrust a horseshoe into the flames to make her go away.
• Hearts are a much-loved motif in many traditions. Paint a red one on a wall and you’ll encourage not only love but also safety, tranquility, and balance in your life.