Jewelry Tea : Beginning Again
It feels like starting over quietly when the road gets challenging has been my go to for years. Allowing myself a hot steep, like tea leaves silently unfurling in boiled water. My inner dimension as a quiet simmering tea pot rumbling on low for the metaphor to the feeling of failure. Loss not rushing but trickling out of me slowly, subsonically, painfully. Then that drip like the soft siren of the tea pot beginning to boil, unraveling something you once poured your whole self into, but then shutting your mouth and swallowing the breath rather than exhaling it...
I thought it was the right thing to do, to favor the quiet path, my mind told me it was the path of taking up the least space, and that that was the kind, magnanimous thing to do: subtle rebrands, hushed pivots, relaunches that whispered.
But today, my latest batch of jewelry, carefully shaped, lovingly torched, melted in the final stage. The metals ran like water under unexpected heat. I stood still, breath caught, gutted. And rather than swallow, I gasped loudly in disbelief.
& I paused, and opted for a geographic shift to quell the inner 'freak out' beginning to bubble up, LOL, & so I left for my parents for the weekend.
There I picked up a book in my fathers office, Gardening at Dragon's Gate by Wendy Johnson, in the first several pages I found just what I was looking for intuitively, by having picked up the book in the first place:
“We build soil by making compost piles and celebrating decay.”
— Wendy Johnson, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate
I gasped again, CELEBRATING DECAY! what ?!? How had I missed this piece of the puzzle of my life? Celebrate decay? Proclaim decay? Shout it from the rooftops? Wait, don't go quietly about the changing tides, go loudly about the tides? High tide yell, low tide shout? How did I miss this WISDOM?
Which lead me to recall a time with Nancy Reubens, my sculpture professor in university...
Under her guidance, I spent a season crafting and carving a human-size terrarium rock. Weeks of labor. Fingernails packed with crustiness. A successful final critique, warm like the flush of sanguine English Breakfast Tea I covet.
Then came the unexpected: “You’ll need to destroy it.”
I hadn’t prepared for this part—the after. The decay. The rot.
Should I save it? Rehome it? I stood in the gallery, heart plunking like water droplets on a still pond, before taking the wisdom of my ancestors that I did already know: try choosing the harder way: I picked up the sledgehammer in the sculpture yard.
I tore into my sculpture with the sledgehammer, POW, BAM, BOOM, and in doing so, I conquered something ancient in me. I shattered not just the rock, but my attachment to creation and my creations. I smashed my relationship to 'things' and time spent on things, and ultimately found that the emotions of destroying the sculpture actually surpassed the glee of creating it in the first place. What the? I ask myself now, internally, ' Wait, what wild nether timeline did I flood into at that time?"
Because here is the tea: destruction is not the opposite of creation. It is creation. The whole cycle is creation. Not just the upswing. Growth. Compost. Rot. Ferment. Nothing grows unless something decays. The garden is not a place of fixed bloom—it is a place of eternal cycles. The boil and the cool. The dried leaves and then the steep.
So when my jewelry melted, I let it. I watched the metal soften and fold like petals in hot water. And I saw it clearly: I don’t require quiet pivots anymore. I need loud ones. Loud failures. Loud stumbles. Loud joy. Let it spill. Let it be hot. Let it nourish.
The most stunning gardens—like the most satisfying accomplishments of our lives—grow from what breaks down. From what steams and swirls beneath the surface.
I grieve the losses. But I also gather them now like rainwater to sprinkle on my garden.
Because I know: something beautiful is brewing in the future.
and maybe this picture of decaying jewelry is the beginning of a rainbow of new sparkling joy and new more vibrant journeys...
