I am doing Meredith Lewis (@dangerousmere) daily creative prompts for the month of December and for Sunday, it was to create my own spell that reclaims my creative identity.

I’ve been thinking about this one for the last day or two and decided that I’m going to give it a miss.

Why?

I’ve never been one for doing such things not because I am a killjoy and want to have a bit of fun but I grew up in a household and culture where spells, hexes and curses were not to be made fun of.

Although I didn’t believe these and would chuckle at the relatives who would find these serious, menacing and threatening, I had to sit back and respect that the fear in their eyes, their stories of family curses and their observations of exorcisms that they couldn’t explain, would make me think twice about doing something to rock the boat. Let sleeping dogs lie.

I put it down to folklore and hype that travels down every generation although we still have elements of it into our culture. For example, the blue eye that we use to ward off ‘the evil eye’ when someone casts jealous intentions or overly admires you, you are overcome with a feeling of malaise that no amount of panadol can overcome.

The old ladies in the Greek village would assume you have the ‘evil eye’ and they would say their incantations under their breath while either using a knotted rope or droplets of olive oil in a glass of water to determine if you had the spell cast over you.

The moment the incantation was said (it wasn’t known by everyone, it had to be passed down and never written), immediately you felt better.

I have no idea about these incantations, evil eye spells and curses and I have been on the receiving end of some things I just can’t explain and at the time, sent a shiver up my arms and something telling me to “just accept that I don’t know some things – nor is it important to know”.

So I put them out of my mind and continued with my day.

So with respect to those who genuinely feel “not to tempt the dark forces in our lives” any more than what we have to deal with life every day, I will not create a spell or a charm.

I am responsible for my own creative identity – not some higher being. It’s all me.