To dive in the darkest depths
Posted on Instagram on March 15, 2018
Someone once told me that you have to accept to dive in your darkest depths, because that's when you come back to the surface with the most beautiful pearls.
I am almost sure it was @sacredfamiliar telling me something Vali Myers had told her once - but I may be wrong.
Anyway, this is something I remind often. Gives me strength in the rough times. Gives a meaning to the pain.
Today I had to bring this one to life - it pushed and pulled and demanded my time and fingers - and I feel this is the message it carries. At least one of its messages.
A strange alchemy, the creation of this pendant.
First I carved the skull in a freshwater pearl; I am growing fond of them.
Then melting a piece of silver, and impressing the texture of a cuttlefish bone on it - excitement, magic. Rotten stink. Hah.
And then came the tendrils that hold this almost-heart-shaped piece, reminding me of spider legs.
And then the snake circling the skull, with the slender thread running through it - is it a lock of mermaid hair? An umbilical cord connecting us to the center of the universe?
It has a surrealistic, dreamlike quality to me, this one.
The feeling that I could discover a new layer of meaning to it, new symbols, every time I look at it. Every time I run my fingers on its surface, on those tiny lines that are almost part fingertips and part layers of earth.
An amulet for all of us, swimmers of the inner sea, deep divers of the uncharted depths, sailors of walnut-husk sized boats on the stormy waters of life.
.
One of a kind, sterling silver and freshwater pearl (and cuttlefish ghost)
Soar Birds
Posted on Instagram on march 13, 2018
"I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen." (Terry Tempest Williams)
The Wound
Posted on Instagram on February 22, 2018
I said: what about my eyes?
He said: Keep them on the road.
I said: What about my passion?
He said: Keep it burning.
I said: What about my heart?
He said: Tell me what you hold inside it?
I said: Pain and sorrow.
He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
(Rumi)
🖤
Sterling silver and a drop of 24k gold.
🖤
I woke up to the snow, too much snow, and the anxiety went up up up. The night was almost sleepless, due to the ovulation - I am kinda surrendering to these rhythms of my body, or do my best to.
I have not journaled in weeks. Resistance. I know it helps me, but I resist it. I am almost scared to let it all out on the paper.
I shovelled snow, in places there was no need to, just to burn energy. To burn a bit of that anxiety with it.
Then I stared. At the snow falling. Hearing my worried thoughts. My heart beating quick, a scared bird in the rib cage. Mouth dry. Shaky hands.
And I went to the bench despite the fear and I surrendered in the way I can: allowing the experiment to guide me. Melting silver. Hammering. And sometime during the process I found the road again...and I ended up making these. Something I saw in my mind a few weeks ago, but that I had put aside, I didn't feel it strong enough then.
This morning I found the missing parts, the needed scratches, and here it is, yet another amulet for the hard days, to hold on to.
I had enough gold to make three little drops, so I made three little pendants.
Surrender.
The wound is the place where the Light enters you.
🖤
Shadow Self II
The shadow self. The parts we don't like to look at. The emotions we don't like to feel.
Our resistance to let go. Our effort to escape death, refuse death, erase death - deaths of different ways, not only of our physical bodies. Death of an old identity. Of a job we don't feel anymore. Of a dream we don't love anymore.
Our scared clinging. Our sense of being isolated, small. Finite. Hopeless.
The song of the bushes and branches and leaves growing around what is dead, the life getting ready to sprout from it once again. Resilience. Cycles of nature.
Of something we belong to. Bigger, wiser, holier.
I carved this skull from a freshwater pearl, then set it in a nest of copper, with sculpted hand fabricated leaves.
Shadow Self
Posted on Instagram on February 18, 2018
Thankyou so much, loves, for all your warm support, the love and light sent our way. I believe it was essential in helping me get back to my feet.
I am in a slightly better place, finally. The situation with the family is still heavy, but I am more at peace - it has gone so bad, for weeks, that I thought more than once to ask for hospitalization. I had my fair share of panic and desperation in my life, but I didn't think a body could go full blow, non stop panic attacks for 3 days in a row. Worn out is not enough to describe how I felt.
But I guess I am resilient.
I am eating again, even if with some difficulty. OCD is still big, but not as much as a week ago.
I changed my clothes after 2 weeks (yay).
And today I went for a test run at the bench - I wanted to see how I coped with the dust and all the ocd triggers and the attention the work requires. I planned half an hour. I ended up making this pendant, which of course took way more than half an hour. Skull that I carved into a freshwater pearl, and a nest of copper and silver leaves and branches for it.
Something cathartic and healing. To make peace with the cycle of life, with the shadow self. To trust the beauty I always can find in decay - the stage when the rose petals change color and wrinkle up and get ready to fall in a breathe of wind.
Those of you who have placed an order in the shop and didn't hear from me, I am getting back to you all between today and tomorrow. I thank you immensely for your patience.