Sunday, March 8, 2009

Psychic Moments with Earth


Beaders have prescience about small things: how many beads it will take to fit around a wrist, which color of gold will look best with some particular stone, when to stop planning and start working. I was reminded of this when we were in the office of an important man who invited my Muse and me to see a new gift he'd purchased for his son. It was on the floor, carefully packaged in many layers, behind his desk. Would I come and pick it up so it could be unwrapped and admired? And it was heavy, precious, said the important man.

"Oh, I said, walking around behind the desk toward where the treasure was mummified in bubblewrap and corrugated paper. "It's a dinosaur egg." Much to everyone's surprise, it was. The magical ancient ovoid was still indiscernible in its enraveled state, so there was no way my basic 5 senses had clued me on that. It just seemed that, on the short walk behind the desk, a dinosaur egg revealed itself dancing in mid air...couldn't have been anything else.

So this necklace came together in that way, visionary dancing in air, making itself asymmetrically and without question. The yellow turquoise barrels themselves seem like dinosaur eggs, and the green turquoise square is a corner of earth whose crevices and faults hide marvelous secrets. But my favorite: the vaseline opalized glass octagon that sits in front: light filtering through it with great mystery.