I decided to wear my “happy” red shoes as an antidote to abundant gray.
Watching them pace the ground, I thought of our national feeling as that we’re not walking on secure ground right now.
I mean this for all Americans.
It’s a weird time.
So, I kept walking… Walking into what I do know and play with every day: Gemstones.
Fragile in some ways and durable in many others, that light reflects eternity.
Some of the world’s most coveted gems are found in Mogok, Burma.
Their saga began as shallow sea sediments 750 million years ago, which were then moved around in a crustal jigsaw puzzle powered by the Earth’s tectonic activity.
These movements weren’t peaceful and orderly, like your auntie’s puzzles on the card table.
The dynamic is more like a 7th grade class at a go-cart track… in slow-mo, over eons…
Around the dinosaurs’ heyday 150 million years ago, a crustal fragment the size of Connecticut containing what would become the Mogok gem sediments rammed into the Eurasian continent.
This is violent stuff; pressures decimate, the friction renders, yet beauty is born.
These sediments laid down in a calm sea of tranquility metamorphosed into minerals better suited to life in the new regime of high temperature and pressure. Interactions from rising magmas and fluids further transformed the rocks.
Today, water has washed most of the Mogok gems down from the mountain ridges to a sediment-laden valley.
A hand then plucked a colored pebble of a crystal from that sediment, began shaping and polishing, eventually exposing its beauty to reflect the light.
Under great pressure, heat and friction that beauty was born to reflect the light.
Wearing a gem is time travel, to the stars and back. It connects us to the earth, what came before and what will come after.
The gems, and us, will endure this too.
