[caption id="attachment_9484" align="alignleft" width="300"]
Image from Girl Scout History Project[/caption]
I was thinking about girl scouting, because it's cookie season.
When I was a kid my mom was a troop leader (and a sunday school teacher, and basically she was always willing to take over something I was doing that otherwise wouldn't happen, and that's a part of her parenting that I do want to bring into my own parenting) and so a couple times a year we'd go down to council headquaters to pick up some paperwork or something and we'd pop into the little store there that sold uniforms and books and...
and badges and pins
At the time I remember being fascinated by the idea that I could theoretically buy ANY BADGE I WANTED regardless of whether or not I'd done the work for it, and nobody would stop me (except, in theory, my mom, I guess?). There were no checks or balances! I could just buy them!
I didn't. But I could have.
And that's the story of why I now have a big mason jar full of badges from my old girl scout days and from estate sales and trading them with other people and also I have a bunch of girl scout pins on my coat and I use them in magic spells because they have built in iconography. They have a consistent look. There's an aesthetic that says "I'm part of something" and implies work put in to owning that badge, whether it's a badge I earned myself or a badge another scout earned years ago and I bought at an estate sale.
There's a story behind a scout badge, just like there is behind a lot of secondhand things, but the badge makes it a little more obvious, a little easier to harness that story into spellwork.
I miss blogging here more often and I'm wondering if anybody has some good prompts to recommend, either the kind that come as a list or the kind that get posted weekly. If you've got suggestions, let me know!