Dandelion wishes

Wish on everything. Pink cars are good, especially old ones. And stars of course, first stars and shooting stars. Planes will do if they are the first light in the sky and look like stars. Wish in tunnels, holding your breath and lifting your feet off the ground. Birthday candles. Baby teeth.

Francesca Lia Block

Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there's no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.

Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

I don't subscribe to the "wish and sit back waiting for stuff to happen" approach to life but, really, is there any harm in dreaming and hoping and throwing a wish or two into the universe? I don't think so. I love wishes. I love the delicious hope that making a wish captures. The acknowledgement and articulation of the thing desired. Thinking it, writing it, whispering it or shouting it aloud when up to that point it might only have existed as an unshaped smudge in one's head. And I love the things we wish on; the little prompts and rituals that are associated with making wishes.

We have a whole collection of these wish prompts in our family. I have yet to encounter a djinni in a lamp but, in addition to the things quoted by Francesca above, other opportunities for wishing include: trains on a railway bridge as we pass under it, eyelashes, ladybugs, wishbones, coins in fountains or wishing wells, rainbows, catching sight of a clock at 11:11 (a colleague told me about that one only a few years ago), standing in sunshine when it's raining (also known as a "monkey wedding" in Africa), fairy rings in the garden and, of course, dandelion puffballs. I can never resist a dandelion. I mean, it not only grants wishes but creates baby fairies too. What's not to love about that?