Sermons in Stones

Two rings I ordered last week have arrived. I have a bit of a weakness for jewellery (fortunately it tends to be for silver rather than gold or gold set stuff) - the talismanic quality of it, its portability, the fact that one tends to remember the occasion of the purchase or gifting, the nonfunctional pure aesthetic satisfaction of it. One can have signature pieces, which are almost constantly worn, and occasional pieces - either too lavish and/ or expensive for everyday wear (I don't really go in for these); or just a piece that's lovely to have and which one needs to complement a mood or an outfit once in a while. Choosing the right ring or bracelet or earrings etc for the day can set the tone. There, that's a good promotional paragraph. Perhaps jewellery design or selling would be my symbol-rich profession of choice, if I hadn't got so absorbed in the reading and writing thing...

So my new rings are both silver-set gemstone rings, both with wonderfully large cabochon stones (that's just a smooth polished stone, no fancy faceting such as a brilliant cut diamond and so on). One is with rhodonite which is a soft opaque pink. The one I'm wearing at the moment is a slightly more ornately set charoite, which is an opaque deep purple with a few swirls of lighter violet mixed in. Great stuff - opaque stones are on trend at the moment, not that this affects me very much.

I do like the more unusual stones though. I look up their mystical and healing properties and it's always very good - another one of those areas where I'm not really sure how much I believe, but nice to know the traditions and associations to something so simple as an untreated piece of the earth. Rhodonite for instance is a stone of love; giving out love, rather than attracting love to oneself. Charoite is quite a new stone sourced only from one riverbank in Russia and is associated with transformations. Labradorite, which I mention below, is also associated with transformations but specifically that of negative feelings and mindset into positive or creative ones.

I think that actually wearing a gem transforms it from being a meditation or worry stone per se to more of an amulet, an adornment, but a gem set as jewellery is still present in the consciousness: held on the hand (for rings) rather than in the hand. Well - but isn't all this a bit unacademic? Two answers to that. One, I'm a poet at the core. We like small things, focal points, sensory symbols, non-functional power. Second, I have more than one academic colleague who is as keen as me on gemstone colours, myths and putative properties. My labradorite (a lovely shimmery green-blue stone) ring often sets off comments and conversations. Perhaps we're all secretly interested in the arcane unacknowledged schools of learning.

I like the little internal lines and threads in my labradorite ring and read somewhere that what is known in the gem trade as 'inclusions' might lower the financial value of the stone, but serve to increase its symbolic/ healing power, for such minute fractures show that the stone has somehow managed to overcome trauma and heal itself. A self-healing stone. So here's an odd little experimental poem I wrote on that subject a while ago. It may yet be revised. Meanwhile I'm typing with my charoite cabachon enclosed in a thick frame of oxidised, floral silver, as though it's a swirly purple world wreathed in the earth's that birthed it.

Gemmology

Your heart
is a self-healing stone
the lines float feint
contain a razor blade
sharp to scar and halve

and half resolved


these gem pieces are much prized
(aspected cloud within the clarity)
a looser definition
of desirable; a crafted

artefact in lattice weave,

with a drafty rent punched through
where something
escaped, leaving
its sloshed wine stain.

Billow talk. A gush of black
where the bright squid isn’t any more
putting you, decoy witness, off –

offering substance and pulse.