Pagan Blog Prompts: Book Of Shadows

First let me say, I sat here at my computer for hours trying to figure out what to write about. I've been having problems with insomnia so my mind is a little sluggish and I'm having a hard time keeping things straight. So, since I couldn't come up with my own idea for writing, and since I promised myself I would write at the very least one post per day, I headed over to Pagan Blog Prompts and picked out a prompt that seems easy enough for my sleep deprived brain to handle.

This prompt asks what everyone's book of shadows is. I don't really have a singular book of shadows. I have a spiral notebook that is green and has brown leaves on it that I use when I'm looking through a book about Witchcraft that I write down my feelings and ideas in but I don't really keep spells or recipes or rituals or anything like that in it, just my ideas. I used to keep a book of shadows when I started studying Wicca that was in a black fake leather journal that I bought at Walmart but I got rid of it because I found a different path that felt more natural to me.

Soon I'm planning on starting another one that will be in a binder with loose leaf pages. I plan on putting herbal information, meditations, and spells in it. I don't do a whole lot of rituals but I might start doing tiny Esbats in my room and recording my thoughts about them in the new book of shadows.

Living in the dorms at college can really test your creative abilities. Many questions pop up that you never really worry about when you live in your own place. I'm blessed because the dorms here at my school are definitely not like traditional dorm rooms. I have my own separate bedroom. Here, each dorm unit consists of two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room + fridge and microwave area. Each bedroom can be locked and the bathroom is only shared by you and your roommate. However, when it comes to reading your tarot cards, doing Esbats, keeping up with a book of shadows, and all the other things that go along with worshiping the God and Goddess or working magick, things can get a little complicated.

I like to be able to leave my book of shadows out on my bedside table and I like leaving my cards out in the open where I can get to them when I feel like using them but having a roommate often prevents that. So far this semester I have been blessed because no one has been assigned to my personal dorm unit yet. I live alone for now. Miss K is constantly here but she doesn't mind seeing my tarot cards or my books about Paganism or my book of shadows just lying around. Last semester I had a roommate that wanted me to do a tarot reading for her once a week.

Other than leaving cards and books lying around, there are certain rules that we have to abide by while living in the dorms that limit what we can and can't have in the rooms. I love candles, and I'm not allowed to have them, not even without with wick, incense is another thing I dearly love and I can't have that either. Of course those are the only things we aren't allowed to have. If I wanted to cover my room in pentacles they wouldn't say anything about it as long as they aren't nailed to the walls. So for Esbats, since I don't do rituals very often, I have to get creative in my ways of representing fire and air.

But that is another topic altogether. As my new book of shadows comes along, I will keep you updated. I'm not sure how I want to set it up just yet. I haven't decided if I just want to type the pages up on my computer, print them out, and put them in my binder, or if I want to do something like a scrapbook, or a kind of combination of the two. We'll see what happens...