lifestyle – Mary Petiet

Lost your Holiday Magic? Need a New Story? 3 Ways Back to You

restore, rediscover, retell

Has 2020 taken your sense of magic? Are old stories no longer serving? Channel the season’s magic to change your stories for a better outcome.

Restore Your Magic

When you were small, was the world enchanted? Were you a part of its flow? That’s because everything the adult world declares inanimate is alive to the child. Remember holiday magic? The holiday spirit definitely falls under this category. Children understand the magic of living, and this is something you can reclaim, remember, and retell through story and myth. Try to remember the magical rapture of being alive.

The images of myth are reflections of spiritual and depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.
Joseph Campbell

Rediscover Your Myth

As adults, we become disconnected from our mythic stories because the structures of the adult world value material profit. We forget our inner journeys as we grow up and conform to those structures. When a society forgets its stories and mythologies, or they fail to work, people forget how to live and enter free fall. A lack of story and myth leads to an attraction to extremes in religion, politics, and civic life. This has been the experience of the pandemic year. However, there is magic and story and myth afoot throughout all of December. Let December’s magic lead you into your own personal myth. What are your stories?

See life like a poem, you are participating in a poem, and the root of the poetry is myth.
Joseph Campbell

Retell Your Stories

Do you tell yourself the same stories over and over and end up with the same results? Is it possible the entire world is doing the same thing as the news becomes more and more extreme? We cannot fix the planet right now, but we can look around ourselves and make as much right as possible. One powerful way of doing this involves considering our stories and changing them for a better outcome: Once, I thought I would never find a parking spot for my car. I drove around and around the parking lot, telling myself I would never find a spot. Then I remembered something I had read recently about imagining what you need to manifest it. So I changed my story. I crossed my fingers and visualized myself finding the perfect parking spot. I did another circle back around the parking lot, and not one, but four spots had opened up!

Restore, Rediscover, Retell

Find your way through this pandemic holiday by retelling the familiar old stories and listening to the magic and myth. Keep the parts the work for you. Then, retell your own stories in ways that also work for you. Your highest self is in your stories, so tell them carefully.

The strategies in this article are excerpts from the book Owl Magic: Your Guide Through Challenging Times.

To read more about restoring, rediscovering, and retelling, get your copy here.

Wild Turkeys, Cranberry Sauce, and Owl Magic

For Thanksgiving, assume abundance.

If you live in New England, have you noticed small dogs sound deceptively like wild turkeys? The dog next door sure had me fooled first thing this morning. I mistook his rumbling bark for turkey chortles, and thought of the old joke: They’re almost ready for Thanksgiving!

Then I remembered I am 3,000 miles away from Cape Cod, and there are no bands of wild turkeys wandering the Dutch landscape.

It was almost Thanksgiving, so it seemed like a good time to wander down to the weekly market in our village outside of Amsterdam for some crucial cooking supplies. You can never be sure what you’ll find in the outdoor market, but I went there assuming an abundance of everything I needed.

Especially cranberries.

I find that if I want to attract the thing I need, I first have to assume there is an abundance of that thing available:

“The best thing we can do is ditch the scarcity mentality. Scarcity is the fear of too little. If you apply this fear to yourself, you set yourself up to experience it because you are sending out the energy that calls scarcity back to you.”
me, in Owl Magic: Your Guide Through Challenging Times

So I entered the market fray full of my own advice and the assumption I’d find lots of cranberries.

I circled the greengrocer’s stall twice, and there was nary a cranberry to be seen.

I took a deep breath.

I’d have to ask, so I consulted Google translate for the Dutch word for cranberry and tried it out on the guy selling vegetables. He couldn’t have been nicer, but he had no idea what I wanted.

Finally, I told him the English word is cranberries, and he understood immediately and said he was sure there had been some earlier, and after much to-ing and fro-ing, he tracked down his colleague-in-charge of cranberries, who revealed a stash half-hidden under a large tarp.

Six bags labeled Ocean Spray had become wet and been deemed unsaleable.

Just to be sure I understood, I confirmed they had been ruined by water. They had.

And that is how I ended up with several pounds of perfect cranberries for a rock bottom price just in time for Thanksgiving far away in the Netherlands.

Ditching the scarcity mentality works.

The cranberries are native to my own home, but my conscience is not completely easy. I should probably return to the market to explain cranberries are made for water. The natural habitat of the cranberry is a bog, which is flooded with water to make them float for harvest.

Especially since once the greengrocer heard I was American he told me how he loves America, and about the time he went to New York.

Flooded cranberry bog by Cape Cod photographer Carole Corcoran

I spent the weekend making cranberry bread and cranberry sauce. My sauce recipe comes from the Peter Hunt Cookbook, a Cape Cod classic found in second-hand bookstores and private bookshelves across the Cape.

You can produce an entire Thanksgiving dinner from this book if you have to. Here is my classic, super easy Peter Hunt recipe for perfect cranberry sauce.

Just make sure you keep the cranberries dry.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Armchair Destination: Inside the Dutch Market

Join me at the Dutch market!

Piles of earthy fall mushrooms, the latest in cauliflower, warm stroop (syrup) waffles from the grill, and generous slices of cheese to taste. Flowers galore, animal supplies, the bicycle guy, fishmongers, and a stand dedicated to fresh French fries. These colorful scenes are typical of the outdoor Dutch weekly market.

Unfortunately, here in the Netherlands COVID numbers are on the rise again which means we, like many others around the world, are spending more time in the house.

What better time to armchair travel?

Join me at the Dutch market!

The Dutch have a lovely tradition of weekly outdoor markets. There are three markets a week within easy biking distance of our house, and each one is a visual feast with a distinct flavor.

And good deals, because the Dutch love a good deal.

So imagine yourself biking across busy streets with your marketing bags in hand, propping your bike up along with all the other bikes-I swear the bikes start chatting as soon as we leave them, they look like they’re totally hanging out together.

Now, plunge into the market with me!

Disclaimer: The following photos were taken before COVID numbers increased.