There was this enormous mirror over my Granny’s couch when I was growing up in Chicago. And when I say enormous, I mean this thing practically took up the whole damn wall above the sofa.

In my memory, you cannot really separate the mirror from the room. I remember everybody being in and out of the house, people playing cards, laughing, fussing, drinking, talking shit, all the regular family noise I talked a little about in the last issue. And above all of it was that mirror.

I remember lying on the couch many days wondering what would happen if that thing ever fell off the wall. It was so big that, as a child, this seemed like a perfectly reasonable concern. That was a whole lot of mirror hanging directly over my little head.

It never fell. All these years later, it is still there.

The funny thing is, that mirror also had rules.

Whenever it stormed really badly, Granny would tell us to cover the mirror and get down. Of course, being children, we wanted to know why. Granny was not about to give us a history lesson on mirror folklore in the middle of a thunderstorm. She said cover it and get down.

Class dismissed.

Years later, after I had already been practicing for quite some time, I started thinking about that mirror differently.

By then, I had already been taught to understand mirrors as spiritually active tools. I worked with them. I understood reflection work, protection, divination, and the idea of a mirror functioning as a kind of spiritual access point or threshold within certain workings. So I was not discovering for the first time that mirrors could hold spiritual significance.

What suddenly intrigued me was the history.

Wait a damn minute. We used to cover that mirror when it stormed.

Where did that come from?

So I went looking.

I found them in older Black folk beliefs surrounding death and mourning. I found them in divination, conjure, revelation, protection, and spirit work. Zora Neale Hurston documented mirrors in several different contexts in her research on Hoodoo. I found the practice of covering looking glasses after someone died. I found older Southern Black folklore involving looking glasses and death.

The more I read, the more that giant mirror from my childhood started sitting inside a much larger story.

Then eventually Granny was asked where she got her habit of covering the mirror.

Her answer was simple.

Big Mama Winnie did it.

Big Mama Winnie was her mother, my great grandmother.

And there it was. At least one more generation back.

According to our family records, Big Mama Winnie was born in Choctaw, Mississippi. At some point she made her way to Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Granny was from. Later, like so many Black families during the Great Migration, our family moved out of the South and built a life in Chicago.

But people do not migrate culturally empty-handed.

They carry their food, language, religion, prayers, remedies, superstitions, music, sayings, family habits, ways of cleaning a house, ways of preparing for trouble, ways of celebrating, ways of protecting themselves. They carry ways of doing things.

So although little me was watching all of this happen in Chicago, I was watching Mississippi women live in Chicago.

Granny learned it from Big Mama Winnie. We learned it from Granny. Somewhere between Mississippi and Chicago, whatever else changed, that particular practice came along for the ride.

People migrate, but practices migrate with them.

We inherited the doing.

Before I Ever Called It Ceremony

The older I get, the more I think about how much of life gets taught exactly that way.

Human beings are ritualistic creatures, but I can really only speak from the cultural life I know. In the Black family life I grew up inside, ordinary life was full of little ceremonies long before I ever thought to call them that.

Take something as basic as praying before a meal. Of course we understood why we were praying. We were blessing our food, giving thanks, asking that it nourish us and cause us no harm.

But technically, you could wake up in the morning and say, Lord, cover everything I eat today, and call it handled.

That was not how we did it.

The meal itself became a moment to stop, acknowledge, bless, and begin.

There were prayers before bed. Prayers before somebody pulled the car onto the highway for a long trip. Things people did when somebody got sick. Things surrounding death. Ways of preparing the house before company came. Ways of cleaning. Ways of protecting. Things people carried. Things they kept near the door. Things you absolutely were not supposed to touch.

Some of these practices had very clear explanations. Some were religious. Some were cultural. Some were simply family habits. Some carried meanings that did not click for me until much later.

Taken together, though, they created a life where ordinary actions were constantly being marked with intention.

That is one of the things I find so interesting about ceremonial living now. Ceremony does not always require stopping your regular life and constructing some elaborate event around it. Sometimes you repeat something so consistently that eventually the ceremony disappears into the life.

It simply becomes how you live.

Sometimes you understand exactly what you are doing but have never thought much about where the custom came from. Sometimes you understand the meaning before you know the history. And sometimes you inherit the ritual before you inherit the language.

The language came later for me with mirrors.

Giving the Mirror a Job

Today, outside of herbs, mirrors are probably among the tools I work with most often.

I use them in Beauty Magic, Glamour Magic, protection, divination, scrying, self-concept work, visibility, attraction, influence, concealment, money work, reflection, and return work. Depending on what I am doing, a mirror can reveal, amplify, reflect, protect, conceal, or make something confront itself.

Sometimes somebody needs to see themselves.

There are workings where the mirror, for me, becomes part of that spiritual instruction: Here. Look at yourself. What belongs to you returns to you.

I understand why mirrors make some people nervous too. One person was taught never to put a mirror across from the bed. Somebody else intentionally places one facing an entrance. Some people will not bring an antique mirror into their house because they do not know who owned it before them or what may have happened around it.

Meanwhile, I will see some gorgeous old mirror in a thrift store and think, Baby, you’re coming home with me.

I am going to cleanse it, prepare it, and eventually I am probably going to give it a job.

I do not work with mirrors from fear. I work with them from relationship, knowledge, boundaries, and purpose.

Spiritual knowledge should make me more capable of navigating my world, not scared of every spiritually significant thing inside it. Water can carry meaning. Doorways can carry meaning. Glass can carry meaning. Crystals can carry meaning. Reflective surfaces can carry meaning.

Am I supposed to get into the shower every morning worried something is coming through the faucet?

Honey, I think not. 

So when a mirror becomes part of my practice, I prepare it according to what I want it to do.

I physically clean it, of course, but I may also spiritually cleanse it with smoke from herbal incense I make, spiritually prepared water such as my Florida water, often with an herb like rue incorporated into the preparation, prayer and incantation, or sound. Bells and tambourines are both things I may use in cleansing work.

Direction has meaning for me too. I tend to move clockwise when I am sealing or closing something and counterclockwise when I am opening something to begin work.

That is simply how I work.

After cleansing, I establish purpose.

The mirror near my doorway has protective work attached to it. Its job includes catching, blocking, or reflecting harmful energy before it travels farther into my home.

My vanity mirror has another job. That is one of the places where much of my Beauty and Glamour work lives.

I have another mirror connected to body work, dancing, sensual empowerment, body positivity, movement, and embodiment.

Other mirrors enter into spellwork. If I am doing reflection or return work around someone’s actions, for example, I might incorporate their image with a mirror, my petition, a candle, and whatever herbs, oils, prayers, or other materials belong to that particular working.

For Beauty and Glamour work, I may write affirmations discreetly around a rim or on the back of a mirror. I use sigils. I may trace a sigil onto the glass with a spiritually prepared oil and then clean the visible residue away.

There are plenty of methods people use for locking and sealing mirrors too. You will run across ammonia, keys, herbs, prayer, symbols, oils, and all sorts of things.

I have my own methods.

And some of my own methods are going to remain my own.

I believe in sharing knowledge. I also believe in keeping some of my damn business to myself.

I will tell you that masks, dolls, and other enchanted objects sometimes stand guard around my mirrors because I have already prepared those objects for protective purposes. Vintage beauty objects, hand fans, masks, and certain forms of adornment also appear repeatedly in my work because my Beauty and Glamour practice is deeply inspired by particular periods of Black beauty, fashion, femininity, and spiritual expression.

Some of that I may write about another day.

Some of it belongs to me and Spirit.

The important thing is that when I look around my home, I know why these mirrors are there.

And that is where they become part of ceremonial living.

I do not wake up thinking, Hmm, I should create a mirror ritual today.

The mirrors are already there. One lives at my doorway. One lives at my vanity. One lives where I dress and move my body. They are part of the décor, but they are also part of the energy and working structure of the home.

I interact with them while getting dressed, doing skincare, spraying perfume, dancing, leaving the house, coming home, preparing myself, and working magic.

After enough repetition, none of this feels like I am stopping my life to perform a ritual.

The ceremony lives inside the life.

The Women at the Mirror

There was another huge mirror at Granny’s house too, this one in her bedroom over her dresser.

And that dresser was its own little world.

Perfumes. Avon. Mary Kay. Dusting powders. Beauty products. All the little things that fascinated me as a girl.

Granny loved fragrance. She loved fashion and adornment. She was extremely fashionable, and naturally I wanted to play in all her stuff.

So long before I had language like Beauty Magic or Glamour Magic, I had already watched women treat beauty as something worthy of time and attention.

I watched them.

My own relationship with beauty did not begin with magic either. Over the years I studied fashion, art, beauty, and cosmetology. I was a designer. I learned how to create garments. I sew. I did hair. I did nails.

Long before I was sitting around philosophizing about Beauty Magic, I was creating beauty with my hands.

I have always felt blessed in two very particular ways. My mind has been blessed with creativity, and my hands have been blessed with the ability to execute what my mind can see.

I see the thing first, and then my hands make it tangible.

I could envision a garment and sit down at a sewing machine and create it. I could imagine a set of nails and make it. I could look at somebody’s hair and already see where I wanted to take it.

The medium changed. The gift did not.

Eventually, though, I became much more interested in what happened after my hands were finished.

I watched the energy shift.

You could say, I did her hair. I did her nails. I made her dress. All true. But none of that quite explains what happens when a woman finally looks at herself.

Her posture changes. Her expression changes. Her energy changes. The way she occupies her body changes. Sometimes the woman looking into that mirror carries herself completely differently from the woman who first sat down.

And I wanted to know: What happened between the chair and the mirror?

That question became much bigger for me than hair, clothes, nails, or makeup.

What happens internally when a woman feels beautiful? What happens when the way she sees herself changes? What happens when something external awakens confidence, sensuality, authority, pleasure, or recognition internally, and then that internal change starts projecting itself back outward?

That is where the magic began revealing itself to me.

When I say beauty may already be there, I do not mean nothing needs tending.

Maybe you were already cute.

Great.

A beautiful garden is still a garden. Ignore it long enough and eventually that thing can look like crap too.

Life happens. Stress, grief, children, work, relationships, heartbreak, financial problems, hormones, lack of sleep, aging, survival. Life affects the vessel, and it damn sure affects what is happening internally.

That is why cultivation became so important to the way I understand Beauty Magic.

I am not standing over a woman declaring, Congratulations, I have made you beautiful.

Absolutely not.

I am helping her tend the garden. What needs nourishment? What has been neglected? What has become overgrown? What beliefs about herself did somebody else plant there? What makes her feel alive? What makes her recognize herself? What does she want to cultivate simply because experiencing herself that way brings her pleasure?

And sometimes that work began very simply.

I was the friend saying, Girl, come here. Let me do your hair. Let’s do your makeup. Put this on. We’re going out.

But it was never only about doing somebody’s hair or putting makeup on her face. There was always an emotional part happening right alongside the physical one.

Why are you listening to these people? Why are you letting somebody else tell you who you are? What do you see when you look in the mirror? Look at your eyes. Look at your lips. Look at your face. Look at these beautiful features you have.

I was doing that kind of work before I ever had language for what I was doing.

Even now, one of the things I will sometimes ask a woman when she is struggling with the way she sees herself is, Do you think your mother is beautiful? Do you think your grandmother is beautiful?

Most of the time, she will say yes.

Okay then. You have her eyes. You have her cheekbones. You have her smile. You look just like this woman whose beauty you can recognize without hesitation.

So why do those same features suddenly become something you cannot appreciate when they belong to you?

That question can open a whole door, because now we are not talking about lipstick anymore. We are getting underneath the feeling. Who taught you that this feature was undesirable? Who taught you to compare yourself this way? Whose opinion have you been carrying around for twenty years as though it were an objective fact about your face?

Today, somebody might place some of that work underneath the umbrella of shadow work. Fine. We are getting to the root of why we feel the way we feel.

But I also do not believe in doing all of that internal work and then pretending the physical experience does not matter.

We live through both.

We have an inner experience of ourselves, and we have a physical experience of ourselves. What happens internally affects the way we carry the body, but what we do with the body can also send something back inward.

So yes, we may sit down and talk about the voice in your head telling you that you are not beautiful, and then we may do your hair. We may talk about why you have spent years hiding your body, and then we may find something for you to wear that makes you want to stand in front of the mirror instead of avoiding it. We may work on the wound and put on the perfume. We may challenge the belief and adorn the body that has been carrying it.

Those things do not compete with one another for me.

Beauty work is about tending the whole woman.

And I cannot talk about why that matters to me without talking about Black women specifically.

We live in a world with very real ideas about which faces, bodies, skin tones, hair textures, sizes, ages, and features are most readily accepted as beautiful. Black women did not invent those standards, and we have spent generations creating beauty in a world that has repeatedly tried to tell us where, when, and how our beauty was acceptable.

There have literally been moments in this country when somebody decided even our appearance needed to be regulated. In 1786 Spanish Louisiana, Black women were among the women of color legally required to cover their hair with tignons as part of a racial social order.

And Black women did what Black women have continued doing ever since.

We rocked the hell out of them.

We styled them every which way from Monday to Sunday. We made beauty out of restriction. We turned something meant to mark and limit us into another place for creativity, adornment, identity, and style. Black women have continued making headwraps a site of beauty, culture, fashion, and self-expression across generations.

That is a whole other conversation about the alchemy and transmutation of Black people, and particularly Black women, because we have an incredible history of finding ways to create beauty, culture, joy, and shine in circumstances specifically designed to diminish us.

But there always seems to be somebody around the corner prepared to try again.

And that is one of the reasons I value doing this work with Black women so deeply.

I have been told I was pretty my entire life.

That does not mean I have never had to do my own work to feel like the best version of myself. It does not mean stress, grief, motherhood, relationships, aging, life, or my own internal struggles have never affected the way I experience myself.

And I have never exactly fit neatly inside the dominant beauty standard anyway. I am a thick, plus-size woman. I am heavily tattooed. I dress alternatively. I have spent most of my life looking exactly how the hell I wanted to look, and people have still consistently told me that I am beautiful.

So my understanding of Beauty Magic was never built around begging society to decide I was attractive.

But my practice is not only for me.

What about the woman who did not grow up hearing that she was pretty? What about the woman who made it to forty years old without ever genuinely feeling beautiful? What about the girl who was always compared with her friends? What about the woman who has spent decades thinking that something about her body, skin, hair, face, size, or features somehow disqualified her from beauty before she ever got the opportunity to decide what beauty meant in her own world?

I have sat with those women.

I have cried real tears with women over the way they have experienced themselves. I have watched them look in the mirror and pick themselves apart. I have also watched something begin to shift when we finally get underneath all that noise and she starts seeing herself with different eyes.

I have watched women remember themselves.

And that is why, no matter how many times somebody tells me Beauty Magic is frivolous, unnecessary, superficial, not serious enough, or somehow unworthy of being meaningful spiritual work, I am going to continue pushing back on that idea.

I have seen too much.

I have watched too many Black women cry tears of joy, relief, recognition, and self-love when they finally look into the mirror and like the woman looking back.

I am never going to throw that work away.

Beauty Magic, to me, is not about convincing a woman that she meets somebody else’s standard. It is helping her discover that she can become the beauty standard within her own world.

Then we cultivate it. We care for it. We adorn it. We own it.

And once she begins standing inside what she has cultivated, another question appears: Who gets access to it?

That is where Glamour Magic opens another door for me.

Now I am thinking about access, perception, visibility, protection, and navigation. What parts of myself do I want amplified in this particular space? What do I want protected? When do I want my beauty, authority, intelligence, sensuality, or creativity to be acknowledged and praised, and when do I want to move completely under the radar?

There are times when I want you to see me. There are other times when I absolutely do not.

There are even times when somebody underestimating me can work perfectly well in my favor. I do not necessarily need to correct every assumption somebody makes about me if their assumption allows me to hide my hand, protect my power, or move without interference.

Glamour, for me, is not always about being the brightest thing in the room. Sometimes it is knowing exactly what I want the room to perceive and whether I want it to perceive me at all.

Beauty allows me to tend what is mine. Glamour allows me to decide how what is mine encounters the world.

And this is why conversations about spiritual gifts sometimes make me laugh, and by laugh I mean they get on my last fucking nerve.

People will tell you all day long that everybody has different gifts. Everybody is not a reader, everybody is not a seer, everybody is not a teacher, everybody is not a healer, and everybody is not supposed to do exactly the same work.

That is absolutely correct, and I agree.

But then you tell somebody what your gift actually is, and suddenly they want to decide whether that gift is valuable enough to count.

In my case, my gifts continually bring me back to Beauty work, Glamour work, empowerment, embodiment, and working with women. I do not hide that. I do not debate it. And I will never feel less than another practitioner simply because my practice happens to be cute.

A nurse can study medicine, work in a hospital, and also understand laying on of hands as part of her spiritual practice. One does not automatically cancel the other. In the same way, I can be trained in beauty, fashion, cosmetology, and creative arts while also having spiritual gifts that move through the work I already know how to perform.

I can sew the dress and spiritually prepare the dress. I can do the hair and work with the emotional condition of the woman sitting in my chair. I can create the nails and place intention into the hands wearing them. I can work with perfume, lipstick, powders, mirrors, jewelry, garments, color, texture, and adornment while understanding that what is happening underneath the aesthetic may also be energetic, emotional, psychological, or spiritual.

If we are going to talk about traditions in which the material world is not spiritually empty, then I do not understand why people suddenly become confused when the material object happens to be lipstick.

Why would an herb carry spiritual significance, but a garment cannot? Why can a candle be dressed, prayed over, and assigned a purpose, but a dress cannot? Why can jewelry become a talisman, but the rings on my fingers somehow stop being spiritually useful because they are beautiful?

If we believe objects can be blessed, consecrated, prayed over, charged, protected, and assigned purpose, I see no reason beauty objects should suddenly be exempt from that conversation.

Even the Bible gives us examples of physical adornment carrying spiritual meaning. Exodus describes sacred garments created with specific fabrics, colors, stones, and adornments, literally described as being made “for glory and for beauty.”

The idea that something beautiful, physical, or decorative cannot also participate in sacred purpose has never made much sense to me.

And these are the materials I know.

I know fabric. I know clothing. I know how a garment is constructed. I know hair. I know nails. I know beauty. I know what can happen to a woman when she finally likes what she sees in the mirror. I know how her posture can change, how she walks differently, how she carries herself differently, and how years of criticism and comparison can begin loosening their grip when she learns another way of seeing herself.

So why would I abandon the gifts that are actually in my hands to imitate somebody else’s work?

And even if nobody before me had ever done the exact thing I do, that still would not stop me.

I do not need proof that somebody performed my exact working in 1842 before I am allowed to recognize its value and figure out how to work with it responsibly in 2026.

I can know my foundation. I can respect what I was taught and the roots I come from. I can study the history. I can understand the principles underneath the work. And I can still expand, create, adapt, and respond to the world I am actually living in.

Knowing where my roots are does not mean every branch has to grow backward.

Sometimes I think people use the word tradition less as a way of preserving something valuable and more as a way of controlling what everybody else is permitted to explore.

And no, I am not talking about taking a practice, stripping it of its cultural context, turning it into foolishness, and then refusing correction. Respect, history, and cultural integrity still matter.

But there is a difference between protecting a tradition and trying to micromanage another person’s spiritual life.

If a practice has always involved working with what is available, then what is available changes as people, places, technologies, and circumstances change. Our lives are different. Our environments are different. The conditions we are trying to address are different.

I am not interested in living inside a spiritual box constructed hundreds of years before I ever walked this earth simply because somebody online has appointed themselves keeper of the lid.

Your rules do not automatically apply to me. Your judgment does not deter me.

This is my work, and I will stand on it until my own spiritual court tells me otherwise.

My work keeps bringing me back to women, back to beauty, back to embodiment, back to empowerment, and back to helping women experience themselves differently. That has been the pattern long enough for me to recognize it.

So that is what I am going to say about that.

What Looking Taught Me to See

Working with mirrors and Glamour Magic for all these years has also given me a tremendous amount of self-awareness, because this work forces you to study the distance between what is happening internally and what is being projected outward.

After enough time, you begin recognizing certain patterns in yourself and in other people. You start asking whether a reaction is actually coming from confidence or whether comparison is underneath it. Is this person genuinely angry about the thing they are claiming to be angry about, or is low self-esteem driving the response? Is there hidden resentment underneath the criticism? Are they projecting something they have not dealt with in themselves? Are they suffering from the belief that another person’s beauty, success, visibility, intelligence, or shine somehow takes something away from their own?

When you have spent years confronting those things inside yourself and helping other people work through them too, they become much easier to recognize.

Call them energies, conditions, spirits, entities, demons, psychological patterns, wounds, or whatever language makes sense inside your worldview. The terminology is less important to me here than the fact that these things leave fingerprints.

And when Glamour work is genuinely part of your gift, you become very accustomed to studying congruency. Does the spiritual match the physical? Does the embodiment match the presentation? Does the energy match the words? Does what somebody says they are align with what continually leaks out of them?

I have spent enough time going through my own shadows, helping women work through theirs, and dealing with projection, confidence, insecurity, self-concept, and embodiment that sometimes I notice an imbalance long before I have any concrete explanation for it.

This happens online all the time.

I may come across somebody teaching spirituality, reading cards, giving advice, or presenting themselves as extremely evolved, and something in what they are projecting simply does not match what I am receiving underneath it.

That does not automatically mean I think the person is a fraud. It does not mean I believe they are deliberately trying to deceive anybody. People are works in progress. Somebody can be knowledgeable and still have insecurity. Somebody can be gifted and still have unresolved wounds. Somebody can genuinely want to help people while still having parts of themselves that need attention.

I try to leave room for that.

I also do not make it my business to call strangers out because something in their energy feels strange to me. That is not what I am there to do. Most of the time I quietly block them and keep moving.

And the funny part is, sometimes months later somebody will say, Girl, did you see what so-and-so said? Did you see what happened with such-and-such?

I go to look. Already blocked. Sometimes I do not even remember blocking them.

And I will sit there thinking, Well damn. Apparently I saw something.

My spirit already said, Girl, no.

That has happened enough times that I have learned to respect the information I am receiving without needing to turn every impression into an accusation.

Discernment does not always require confrontation. Sometimes discernment simply tells you where not to stand.

And this taught me something else about Glamour Magic.

Most people talk about glamour in terms of what we put on. How do I want to be perceived? Which part of myself do I want to amplify? What am I concealing? What am I protecting? When do I want to be highly visible, and when do I want to disappear into the background?

But when you work this deeply with glamour for long enough, you also become better at recognizing a glamour when somebody else is wearing one.

You start noticing the distance between the presentation someone is offering and the embodiment or energy you are actually receiving.

A person can present as deeply confident while insecurity is leaking through everything they do. Someone can preach peace while behaving as though they are constantly searching for a fight. Someone can perform sisterhood while visibly struggling with another woman’s beauty, attention, or success. Someone can project spiritual authority while their conduct consistently reveals a lack of self-awareness, accountability, integrity, or emotional regulation.

Seeing that does not make me better than that person.

It gives me information.

Sometimes that information inspires compassion, and sometimes that information tells me to stay the hell away from that person.

And that is one of the balances of Glamour Magic that I think gets overlooked.

The practice is not only about learning how to create perception. It is also about learning how to perceive.

It teaches you how to notice what is being projected, what is being concealed, what is being exaggerated, and what simply does not match.

Flat out, you learn how to read between the lines.

Sometimes I will watch somebody come online with a story and everybody in the comments immediately takes the presentation at face value. They have already chosen the villain, diagnosed everybody involved, and started screaming, Girl, cut her off!

And I am sitting there thinking, Wait. Are we listening to what she is actually saying? Because something ain’t adding up.

I saw a woman do this recently while talking about a close friend who had confronted her about constantly copying her. She brought the entire disagreement online, shared the friend’s private messages, and framed the story as basically, This girl is jealous of me and accusing me of copying her when I don’t copy her at all.

Already, my eyebrow was up.

This is supposedly your good friend. She came to you privately with something that bothered her, and your response was to take her messages to thousands of strangers so they could help you drag her?

I do not know either one of these women, so why would I immediately decide that one of them is jealous simply because the other one got to the internet first?

Then she started presenting her evidence.

She showed the outfits her friend had accused her of copying, and beside them she produced the Pinterest post, TikTok creator, or Instagram woman she said she had actually copied the outfit from. Her defense was essentially, See? I didn’t copy her. I copied this woman.

And I’m sitting there like… girl.

Are y’all hearing this?

Even if I accept her version completely, she has just demonstrated that directly recreating other women’s outfits is something she regularly does. She apparently keeps enough track of those inspirations to show exactly where each look came from.

So why would I automatically conclude that the one woman in close proximity to her is imagining things when copying other women’s looks is already an established behavior by her own admission?

That does not prove that her friend was right about every accusation. I was not there, and I do not know either woman.

But it does mean there was more information sitting inside that story than, Her friend is just jealous.

That is what I mean by reading between the lines.

People will often tell you far more than they realize they are telling you. Sometimes the most revealing part of a story is not the conclusion somebody gives you. It is the little detail they offer while trying to convince you of the conclusion.

Glamour work has made me pay very close attention to that space. Not only, What are you showing me? but also, What are you accidentally showing me while trying to show me something else?

The practice can teach you how to shape perception. It can also teach you how to look past presentation and ask better questions.

And seeing through something does not mean I have to tear it apart. I can simply see it and move on with my business.

What Was Already There

Point being, I have lived a life of Beauty and Glamour work long before I ever had those exact words for what I was doing.

It has shaped the way I understand women, adornment, confidence, embodiment, perception, discernment, and myself.

And when I bring all of that back to the story that started this issue, it makes perfect sense that mirrors eventually became such a central part of my work.

Because I stared at Granny’s mirror for hours.

Not doing anything magical. I was a child. Sometimes I was simply lying on the couch looking at it.

I stared at my own reflection, but I also studied the mirror itself. That enormous ornate frame, all that filigree, all those little intricate details. I traced it with my eyes over and over again.

It was not just glass hanging on a wall. It was beautiful.

It was a statement piece. It was one of those things in the room that made you look at it whether you meant to or not, and Granny loved that mirror.

Apparently, all of that got into me too.

To this day, I do not think a room feels quite complete without a gorgeous ornate mirror. I love them large. I love antique mirrors, vintage mirrors, elaborate frames, all the little details that make the object surrounding the reflection just as beautiful as the reflection itself.

Walk through my home now and you will find mirrors everywhere.

I got that from my Granny.

And there you go.

That is the funny thing about tradition. Sometimes we imagine inheritance arriving as some formal lesson where somebody sits you down, explains the history, gives you all the terminology, and announces, This is what our family does, and this is exactly why we do it.

A lot of the time, it does not come wrapped up that neatly.

Sometimes you are just a little girl lying on your Granny’s couch underneath this humongous mirror, periodically wondering when the hell the thing is going to fall and crush you, and why every time a bad storm rolls through somebody is covering it up like the mirror is about to walk down the aisle.

Meanwhile, you are absorbing everything.

You see Granny sitting at her bedroom mirror with her perfumes, powders, jewelry, and beauty products. You see how she adorns herself. You see what she cherishes and what she protects. You see how she cleans her home and how she carries herself inside it.

You notice what goes near the door, what goes over the door, what gets thrown into a purse before somebody leaves the house, what gets prayed over, what gets kept, and what gets treated like it matters.

You watch what makes these women light up.

You do not necessarily know you are learning anything. You are simply living with them.

Yet all those little things begin shaping you.

Then you grow up and start asking questions. You study. You practice. You talk with Spirit. You find elders who have language for things you may have experienced long before you understood them. You read. You research. You experiment. You learn what belongs to you and what does not. You develop relationships with your tools, your spirits, your own spiritual core, and eventually with your own judgment.

Somewhere along the way, you begin figuring out who you are and why you are here.

You learn to trust yourself and the spiritual team you walk with, even when the world has an opinion about what you should be doing. You discover your gifts, then you hone them and own them. You create in your own way while still honoring the foundations underneath you, because tradition can give you roots without becoming a ball and chain around your ankle.

And I think that is one of the things The Art of Ceremonial Living is helping me understand about myself.

I was not introducing ceremony into a life that never had it. I was becoming conscious of ceremonies, traditions, habits, and ways of living that had been shaping me all along.

Big Mama Winnie did it. Granny watched her. I watched Granny. And now my daughters watch me.

The practices are not identical, the women are not identical, and the world certainly is not identical. But I find something deeply beautiful in realizing how much women can teach one another simply by allowing ourselves to be witnessed living.

My daughters have watched my baths, my perfumes, my mirrors, my skincare, my teas, my herbs, my prayers, my routines, the way I adorn myself, and the way I tend my home.

My oldest is fourteen now, and she has already created some of her own little rituals around beauty, skincare, tea, fragrance, rest, and her personal space.

She watched me.

Just like I watched the women before me.

The difference is that now I can also give her some of the language. I can explain more of what I am doing and why. I can give her books. I can answer questions. I can tell her where something came from when I know, and I can tell her when I do not know.

Then she gets to decide what belongs in her life.

She may carry all of it. She may carry some of it. She may leave half of Mama’s stuff right where she found it and create something completely different.

That belongs to her.

But she will have the doing and some of the explanation.

And maybe that is part of why I write The Art of Ceremonial Living in the first place.

I do not offer these essays as some formal teaching system. I am not trying to make anybody live like me, and I do not need to position myself as anybody’s guru.

This is me documenting me.

My life. My thoughts. My practice. The things I remember. The things I have learned. The things I am still figuring out. The ways I have made a spiritual life inside an ordinary one.

Whoever wants to read it is welcome to sit down with me for a while.

Maybe somebody finds something useful. Maybe another woman recognizes something from her own family. Maybe somebody reads one of these entries twenty years from now and it sends her looking into her own history.

And maybe one day my children are the ones reading it.

Maybe they are trying to remember something Mama used to do, or wondering what I thought about a particular thing, or trying to understand why their mother had all these damn mirrors everywhere.

I want them to be able to find me.

Not a polished mythology of me. Not some version of me written by somebody else.

Me.

This is what I remembered. This is what I learned. This is what I believed. This is how I practiced. This is what I made my own.

I have been doing this work for decades. I have lived enough, practiced enough, created enough, failed enough, learned enough, and watched enough to know that I do have something to offer if somebody finds value in hearing it.

They do not have to become me. They can simply witness me living.

Maybe writing itself becomes another kind of mirror that way.

Something a person can look into later and see a reflection of somebody who was here before them.

And Granny’s enormous mirror is still hanging over that couch in Chicago.

After all these years, all those storms, all those family gatherings, all that card playing, laughing, fussing, drinking, talking shit, children growing up, and people coming and going, that mirror is still right there.

My family already knows that whenever the day comes that Granny is no longer here, that mirror is coming with me.

There has never really been a question about it.

Maybe everybody knows how much I have always loved it. Maybe they know exactly how perfectly it belongs in the home I have created now. Or perhaps after spending my entire childhood staring at the damn thing, I have established squatter’s rights.

Either way, that is my mirror.

And there is something beautiful about knowing that one day it will hang in my home.

Not because I need it in order to continue what Granny gave me. By now, mirrors already live throughout my home, my routines, and my spiritual practice.

But that particular mirror carries a piece of my family story that no other mirror ever could.

And eventually, it will not stop with me.

Granny’s mirror, along with the mirrors I have collected and worked with throughout my own life, will one day be passed down to my daughters. And y’all will probably never fully understand how meaningful that is to me.

Those women watched one another. They carried practices, habits, beauty, protection, memory, and ways of living from one place to another. I watched them. My daughters watch me. And one day, they will have objects in their hands that were present while all of that was happening.

The practices travel. And so do the things that hold our heritage.

That is part of what ceremonial living has come to mean to me. It is not only the rituals we deliberately create. Sometimes it is recognizing the sacredness already sitting inside the things we have been doing, touching, carrying, protecting, admiring, and passing along for years.

One day, those mirrors will belong to my daughters.

And perhaps one day, they will pass them to theirs.

That is how tradition travels.

If mirror work interests you, I invite you to explore your own relationship with it. Not because you need to work with mirrors the way I do, but because your own practice may have something entirely different to show you. Maybe mirrors have a place in your spiritual life. Maybe they do not. Maybe your family had customs around them that you have never thought much about.

Sometimes simply asking the question opens a door.

And maybe mirrors are not the thing at all. Maybe there is something else in your family story waiting for you to notice it.

Journal Prompt for this Issue

What have I been doing for so long that I have never stopped to ask where I learned it, what it means to me now, or whether I want to carry it forward?

Think beyond formal spiritual practice. Consider how you care for your home and your body, the things you say before leaving the house, what happens when somebody gets sick, the objects your family keeps, how you prepare food, how you celebrate, how you grieve, what you protect, what you consider beautiful, and the little rules you follow without remembering who first taught them to you.

You may discover a tradition you never realized was a tradition. You may remember something your family once did that you valued but somewhere along the way stopped doing. You may even find yourself wanting to return to something that once gave you comfort, identity, connection, or meaning.

Sometimes looking backward helps us understand pieces of ourselves that we never realized were inherited. Other times, we already know exactly where something came from, but we have not stopped long enough to honor it, remember it, or recognize how deeply it shaped us.

Heritage can live in very ordinary places. In a prayer. In a recipe. In the way somebody cleans a house. In the perfume on a dresser.

In a mirror hanging over Granny’s couch.

Sometimes the things that become part of our deepest understanding of spirit, family, love, memory, and this human experience were sitting beside us long before we knew they were teaching us anything.