I couldn’t wait for 2015 to be over, and I wonder if by rushing it out the door, I may have offended karma.
We have a second home in the Keys, and when we arrived in December, we were looking forward to some much-needed sunshine. One of the things we love about the place is it can be raining in the morning, but by afternoon, the sun is shining. Well, until this weather front moved in, a weather system unlike any the meteorologist had seen. We tried to pretend it didn’t matter; we were still able to wear shorts. But by day six, we had had enough. We needed to get rid of the rain and all the other bad spirits that had followed us around in 2015, so we decided to smudge our house with white sage.
Yes, I said ‘smudge.’ I am a big fan of reality TV’s The Long Island Medium (Theresa Caputo). Before she starts her reading, she lights a bundle of white sage, walks around her house and waves it around to ‘smudge’ away negative energy. After a quick Google search, I got the details on smudging (but still needed to locate a bundle of dried white sage on our little island of 6,000 people.
Our first stop was the grocery store. They didn’t even have regular sage, much less dried white sage. The next stop was the head shop, and if you don’t know what a head shop is, you might have missed the ’70s. I walked in and asked the clerk for white sage bundles. He pointed to the wall where I had my pick. I was confident good times were ahead.
After lighting the odorous bundle, you smudge yourself, then every corner of the house while saying, “Air, fire, water, earth; cleanse, dismiss, dispel.” Once we completed this, we buried the ashes and the remainder of the bundle in the yard. About two hours later, the rain moved out and the sun shone. We headed over to a friend’s house for a boat ride. Oddly, their boat didn’t start. I smugly thought perhaps they should have smudged their own house.
We got back to our house, and while the house smelled a bit like incense, I was pretty sure we had left the bad luck behind until my daughter came into our room and said the pipes were hissing in the bathroom. My husband sprung into action and announced a pipe had burst behind the wall. He quickly turned off the water, but since we have only one shut-off valve for the whole house, it means no water anywhere. Good news, bad news: My daughter and husband were leaving the next day. I was staying, and a girlfriend was joining me for the weekend.
My friend is a good sport and we managed, but I wonder: Did the smudging work? Maybe the pipes burst while we were there in order to prevent a lot more damage. Or just possibly this was karma’s way of telling me to stop fooling around with it—it was going to do what it was going to do regardless of how many white sage bundles I burned and incantations I said. I don’t know the answer, but I do have two unlit white sage bundles and a book titled The Smudging and Blessings Book, just in case anyone wants them.
