PsychKicks©: Relics, Amulets and Mementoes

Psych yourself up with like-minded sidekicks by exploring the symbols all around us—together.

Source of Inspiration

My old recipe box

Psychometry. Another “psych” word.  Here’s a wonderful definition from a how-to article on developing psychometric skills:

Psychometry is a common ability best known from TV where a psychic touches some physical object like a photo and describes what he sees. The ability isn’t really different from psychic reading, but this time instead of reading a person, a person is reading an object. [1]

I’m not suggesting you spend the week learning to read everyone’s jewelry, key chains and memorabilia, unless it turns you on. But I do want to explore how the energy objects hold affects our feelings about keeping or getting rid of them. Some people have good luck charms. Others have things they consider sacred even if they don’t realize it.


There are some things I own that are nearly useless and unnecessary … but I can’t let them go. One is my old recipe box. What could be more quaint or ugly than a primary yellow, plastic flip-top box for 3 x 5 cards with alphabetical dividers? 

My sort-it compromise? To consolidate a pair of matching recipe boxes into one. How could I toss the last kitchen relic, even with most of my recipes saved in my computer or easy to find online?


The recipe box reverberates with my mother’s instructions for potato bread, written with her usual misspellings and amusing malapropisms. My Aunt Faye’s dessert recipes. My friend Jinni’s peanut butter drop candy, too rich for me to even consider making anymore … but Jinni and I started as pen pals 58 years ago! I was into long-distance, written friendship way before the Internet. And those other favorites from friends long gone or barely in my life anymore. These bits of paper chewed by cabinet moths and clippings yellowed by time? A scrapbook of my life and tastes. For the small space it takes up, my recipe box is coming with me to my grave (or more likely, the crematorium).


Pictures and jewelry are pretty obvious as mementoes with tangible energy, but some “relics” are more subtle. For example, I made a magic wand from a small branch of one of our oak trees. (As much an art object as a Harry Potteresque manifesting tool.) Our present home is where my husband and I have lived in the longest in our lives. It represents stability and beauty as it sits in a stand of these ancient oaks near a year-round creek. My wand is now a relic because its parent tree became diseased and had to be taken down earlier this year. I could no more part with something containing the energy of that fatherly, protective tree than I could betray my husband or best friend.


Speaking of my hubby, he has a relic that both annoys and inspires me. It’s a brick from his high school, St. George, in Evanston, Illinois. The school no longer exists. It was torn down years ago. The brick is ugly and heavy. Tim will not part with it. I hope we can incorporate it into a planter or turn it into something more useful than a doorstop, something that reflects how much it is cherished. It comes from the city where we met when we were 12 years old.


I love rocks, feathers, pine cones or other pieces of places I have visited. I carry the places I love primarily by buying jewelry when I travel. Each piece contains a droplet of the entire ocean of my memories: Sedona, the Pelion Peninsula in Greece, Istanbul, Monterey and Carmel. San Diego.

Growing up Catholic, I was taught young to worship and live with reverence, joy and ritual. Life is a sacred adventure. In the ecclesiastical sense, relics are the body, some part of the body, or some personal memorial of a saint, martyr, or other sacred person, preserved as worthy of veneration. [2] This idea really stuck in my psyche.

That’s why my windowed cabinet above my sideboard has fewer knickknacks to make room for the little pine boxes of ashes. They belong to my late, great fur kids: Bear (dog) and kitties Duffy, Darrin and Bogey. And, oh yeah, my brother because I still don’t know what to do with him, as if I ever did. (He didn’t specify his wishes. He really had no idea or preference. It comforts me to have him near, his photo smiling nearby.)


And a pair of other cat urns in the garage. We’ll all be thrown to the winds together someday in one or more of the following: Lake Michigan, Klinger Lake in Sturgis, Michigan; Lake Tahoe, the American River or the Pacific Ocean. They’re the bodies of water that have meant the most to me. My water relics.


If you happen to be there when I go for my final swim and see some yellow flecks flying with my remnants, it’s just my recipe box sticking with me to the bittersweet end.

This Week's Question

What are your treasures that contain the vibrations of a person, place or thing you love? Make a list and maybe a special place for them. Be sure to remember to write in your last will and testament how you want them distributed. If they are/were precious to you, no doubt they will be to other friends or family.
I’d love you to hear your thoughts in the Comments.

~~~

Photo Credits: Kids side kicking ~ keigo1027yasuda – fotolia.com, Recipe box ~ 


References

1. “Five steps to read an object with psychometry,” http://astateofmind.eu/2010/04/02/5-steps-to-read-an-object-with-psychometry/.
2. Dictionary.com, relic: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/relic?s=t

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