The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home - Arin Murphy-Hiscock 2018

Why Hearthcraft Is So Special
A Place to Call Home

Hearthcraft functions on a very basic truth:

Living your life is a spiritual act.

Having said that, it can be hard to isolate exactly what constitutes spirituality and, by extension, how to actively support it in the home.

What makes hearthcraft so special is that the principles of it dovetail—in fact, are—the things you do every day in your home. In essence, this book is designed to help you recognize those things and lend awareness to them so that you can appreciate them all the more. It also offers some ideas on how to enhance those everyday actions and objects in order to facilitate or deepen your experience.

What Is Spiritual to You?

Nurturing the spiritual element of the home is key to the path of the hearth-based house witch. How can you do this? The answer depends on how you define spiritual. You’ve already read some basic definitions, but what is crucial to this practice is defining the term for yourself. Think about these questions:

✵ What constitutes a spiritual experience for you?

✵ What are the characteristics of a sacred object?

✵ What elements of an action render it spiritual?

These are huge questions, and the answers will be different for every person who tries to answer them. Attempting to define spiritual can be challenging, frustrating, and faith-testing. You may not be able to say more than “I just know when something is spiritual,” and that’s fine. In essence when you recognize something as spiritual, you acknowledge that something about it moves you or touches you deeply in a very specific way, evoking certain feelings that may be indefinable.

Focus Your Practice

Once you know what kinds of things you find spiritual, or what kinds of events or actions evoke that response within yourself, then you may have some idea of where to focus in your practice of home-based spirituality and how to identify or establish everyday activities that can support your spirituality, recognizing and using these spiritual moments to reinforce your commitment to making the home a spiritual place. One method of doing this is to use these moments or activities as an opportunity to think about “important” things (not “important” as in balancing your checkbook or picking up groceries for dinner but as an issue related to your spirituality); an opportunity to send good thoughts out toward your family, friends, and community; an opportunity to practice a form of “walking meditation,” where you perform a simple, ongoing action with a clear mind. Perhaps you take a moment to say a prayer or simply open your heart and talk to God in whatever form you envision the Divine, the universe, the spirit of love, or whoever you feel like talking to.

Maintaining healthy spirituality means keeping yourself relaxed, focused, and practicing something. It means keeping the lines of communication open between you and something greater than you. The term practice is often used to describe what one does in respect to one’s spiritual path, and it means physically or intentionally acting upon a theory associated with the path. By actively seeking out or defining spiritual activity, you create the opportunity to develop a deeper connection with the world around you. (Chapter 2 explores sanctity in more depth, especially as it pertains to the home.)