It may surprise you that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Nor is it just culture telling us sparkling jewels are beautiful: our ancestors also found beauty in gemstones and loved to adorn themselves with them even before they could put their love into words.
It’s deep in our minds, a gift handed down from our most ancient ancestors’ intelligence, skills, and rich emotional lives.
Our emotional reaction to our senses – the view of the night sky, the sound of music, the light gleaming from a gemstone, and the shapes of the jewelry we ornament ourselves with will be with our descendants and us as long as the human race exists.
I bet many of you have recently had a significant milestone occur.
Perhaps a new baby was born…. or (like me) you will become an empty nester this year. Did you have a significant birthday? Maybe you reached a goal….or emerged from a time of personal challenge and found your way back to yourself.
How did you celebrate those milestones? A meal, a ceremony, a party? Once those events are over unless you’re good at producing photo books, we rarely look at them again.
Jewelry adornment is encoded in our DNA.
We have an instinctual impulse to gather jewels as talismanic symbols of meaning and power. Since the world began, jewels have been living things that nourish and protect us with their imagery.
Holding a gem is time travel.
Early in my career, I worked in as a geologist in gem mines. I’d be underground in a mine and occasionally extract a mud-covered crystal from the host rock hoping it was a fine one but couldn’t see it in the dark underground.
Excitedly, I’d take it out to the sunlight, wash that gem off and hold it up to the light. I’d be keenly aware I was the first person ever to hold that gem and expose it to the sunlight since it was born hundreds of millions of years ago.
Myths about gems abound in many cultures.
Ruby, because its red is also the color of blood, was considered to hold the power of life – that’s why it is in most Crown Jewels. Wearing amethyst was thought to protect from drunkenness which as you might have discovered doesn’t really work … yet it’s now used by many for spiritual awakening. In Harry Potter, the sorcerer’s stone is a source of great power, and the Lord of the Rings is about the search for the “one ring that will rule them all.”
The Jewelry Legacy
Your jewelry is a tangible link from the past to the present and into the future.
Jewelry is powerful because we mark our life events, hopes, loves and dreams in enduring, precious stone which becomes imbued with our energy over time and so increases in its power.
That energy is then gifted to those who come after….and our jewelry collection becomes a time capsule of our life – a message in a bottle.
The stories you associate with your jewels alchemizes them into personal power pieces.
They can be antique jewels you’ve collected, carefully chosen from the Georgian period transmitting your love of detail and history …
…Or, the ring your partner scrimped and saved to buy you back when you both were in college – you could afford something much grander now, but prefer to remember those early times and how far you’ve come together…
…The bespoke jewel you co-created telling the story of a significant time in your life…
…That ring your mother handed down to you won’t just be a ruby ring, it will be “Mother’s ruby ring – the ring Grandpa gave her on her 18th birthday to remind her of how he loved her curly red hair that he’d pet as he tucked her into bed singing a song with the line, “….and, I chose the saucy little redhead.”
Family Jewels
Knowing that story makes that ruby ring even more powerfully talismanic. In this way, regular jewelry transforms into “Family Jewels” and a jewelry box becomes a treasure chest of the most meaningful kind.
Each person’s life is a library of many volumes and stories. When somebody passes, I think of Julius Caesar’s burning of the library of Alexandria which destroyed all the works by the greatest thinkers and writers up to that time, and how all that information was lost to the world.
When we pass, the book of our life experiences goes with us. But, some of it can remain. We can write our lives in stone – using the earth’s precious gems and metals. To remember something, we speak of writing it in stone, don’t we?
We inherit the power, beauty and history of the earth by wearing her gems and metals and we pass those jewels, now infused with our life energy, on to others.
Mark your life’s moments with something that has deep meaning, and pass your stories on in jewels that will light the way for those who come after you.
Have you dreamed of a jewel that uniquely reflects your life’s essence that can be carried over the generations?
