Later today I will enthrone my blue bottle on the tree there. No fanfare, hoopla or celebration will accompany it, but rather a solemn moment of enormous meaning for me. God knows me & loves me like no other!! I love Him & will endeavor with all that is in me to follow Him!!!
If you haven't already, please go back a few entries & read "Listening to my Father"---it will explain why this is so heartfelt for me. ***This I know!
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This is cut & paste from the Avery Research Center webpage.......
"According to primarily West-African traditions, bottle trees are used to keep
evil spirits—“haints” or “wooly boogers,” for example—out of one’s home. They
even are effective on a particularly nasty goblin known as a “plat eye”—in
Gullah culture, the evil spirit of someone improperly buried…
The spirits come out at dusk and are beckoned inside by slanting light
refracted through the sparkling blue bottles. Once inside, the spirits are
trapped. Some say they are vaporized when the bottles are flooded with
morning sun. Others say the spirits simply cannot escape the bottle and that
you can hear them moaning in agony when the wind blows through the tree
branches.
Though today the trees are adorned with bottles of many colors, blue is
particularly popular and particularly true to the tree’s origins. Rosalyn Browne
of the Penn Center in Beaufort, SC says the color blue long has been believed
to ward off evil spirits.
In fact, the aspect of using colors and symbols—related to good spirits
and bad sprits—came with the Africans themselves, as they came to
the Americas from Africa or the Caribbean"
