As part of my 31 Days of Magic process, today’s requirement is an anointing of the self with oil.

Oil has ancient connotations of costliness and complexity.  In this context, it doesn’t mean petroleum by-products, but rather a type of perfume — a costly and labor- and specialized-distillation-equipment-intensive process for extracting the essential oils from a plant.  Not easy at all.   It represents a tremendous investment of time and energy.  And the prices for oils usually resemble that challenge.

For people in the Maker movement, this presents a bit of a challenge.  It’s not easy to teach people how to use oils when they’re expensive and rare, and easily wasted in the wrong sorts of ways.

That said, I’ve been given, or acquired by purchase,  or made, a number of nominally magical oils over the last few years of my life. Today, I accumulated them in one place. Some of them were the work of Sarahluna, my partner, through her business, Laughing Owl Elixirs; one was purchased from Deb Castellano‘s online store, the Mermaid and the Crow; one was the work of my friend Nick, who used to do this sort of thing semi-professionally; and some were my own work.

But I tend to forget to USE them. I forget to mask my own scent with the scents that others have built.  Part of this is that as a child and teen I had a series of unpleasant allergic reactions to things like deodorants and antiperspirants; and I became gun-shy about using them.  It’s nice not to stink around other people, this is a good thing… but not if it’s at the cost of horrible rashes under your arms.

Anyway, horrible teen acne in horrible places aside… I don’t usually remember to wear scents of any kind.  But today, it’s part of the work. And so, I’m thinking about what I’m doing today — going to the grocery store, getting some supplies, organizing, doing some work for work starting up tomorrow, some magic… yeah. I need magician oil.  This is an oil Sarahluna made for me a while back.  She’s good about such things.

So I put some of that on.  At wrists, behind ears, and then off to work I go. I’ll write a second part to this post, as an update, to report on how it goes.

UPDATE (7:40pm): So, I got my grocery shopping done.  I was able to do a bit of meditation while waiting in line, but honestly — I swept through the grocery store with speed and ease.  Good.  Got my supplies.  Got my paperwork organized for the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016.  Got my magical practice done.  And, as an addition, five different people contacted me about magical work — advice, opinion, guidance, and actual effort on their behalf.  Pretty good for wearing a perfume.

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