Today, it’s raining. It’s not cold. It’s not hot. Here in the St. Louis (MO) area that means it is humid, on top of the rain. If you were here, you’d understand. You know how in AZ they say it’s hot, but it’s a dry heat when it’s over 100 degrees? Yeah, well, here it can be pouring rain and the rain is wet, but in between the rain drops or the drizzles, it is a soul-sucking humid during the summer. You can stand on your porch thinking you might get a cooling breeze from the rainstorm, but what you get is drenched with sweat and miserable as the humidity leaches away your humanity.

I am not from around here, thankfully. I grew up in the mountains. The Appalachian Mountains. Yes, it gets humid there. Don’t get me wrong. I miss being outside, in the woods, on a hill, in the rain. I miss the chill, the wind, and the noises the rain coming down made as it hit leaves, bark, ground litter, squirrels, and birds. I miss the energy of the mountains.

When you live so far away from home, or even if you don’t, what do you do to help ground yourself in the energies that you so miss? To ground yourself in the nostalgia of the past?

You come to your Grimoire.

You write down how you are feeling now, right where you are. You engage with that energy that you are front and center, the here and now.

Now, what feels right to you to cover that up?

Are you going to collage over it with bits and pieces? Maybe use one single sheet of something to cover it over? Paint it? Splatter it with bits and bobs of ink and marks and whatnots?

Personally, I like to leave a little bit of that initial writing visible because those are valid feelings and I am not attempting to negate them. I merely want something else, something more, that my here and now cannot give me.

I like to use thin layers of paint. I don’t want to be able to read everything I wrote, but just a glimpse here and there is fine.

Sometimes I have photos printed out from Home. I will cut those out, mountains, leaves, creeks, and I will glue them to the page or pages. I will add washi tape and/or doodles around the edges to bring them out more.

Since it is the mountains, sometimes I will add the colors of the mountains, the browns of the leaf litter, the grey-greens of the twisting man-made paths into the forests, the silver and green of the trees themselves, darker greys for the shadows, maybe hints of brighter colors for flowers here and there. I will print out my photos on my printer. I tear the edges around the bits of the photo I want to keep. Once I glue that down to the page, I work to incorporate the photo into the background. I don’t mind if you can tell there are edges there.

How, then, do you gather the energy of Home in that your spread?

You sit and you meditate with it. You envision in your mind and in your heart, as clearly as you can, every aspect of the place you created in your Grimoire, your nostalgic place. Engage all of your senses. Remember the sounds, the sights, the smells, what you hear, what you felt physically, what you felt spiritually, emotionally.

Build the energy up and allow it to flow into your work, into your spread, onto your pages. Allow your Grimoire to hold those energies for you.

Any time you need that energy, you need that pick-me-up, you need that sense of Home, it is right there in the pages of your journal, waiting for you.

You Grimoire longs for you as you long for Home.

Not interested in a specific place?

Are you missing a specific person?

Are you missing your old room? Or your old apartment?

Maybe you are missing a pet?

An old hobby or sport?

Perhaps an event that you attended, or perhaps missed but wanted to attend?

All of the above still stands true. Create a page, or a double-page spread, or use as many pages as you want, to create a spread in the same manner as above.