Inner Peace Through Jewelry Making

I gaze across my craft table, smiling with anticipation. I’ve pulled out all my little bins, and a profusion of cut and polished stones spills across the table. I start to organize and arrange, but I’m immediately distracted.

I get lost in the blue and brown swirls of a jasper, seeing a river winding down a mountainside. The bright flashes of ruby embedded in zoisite recall flowers peeking through fierce jungle foliage. And the ripples in an agate take me back to the shores of Lake Superior, rock-hunting on the basalt beaches while the waves crashed at my feet.

Rocks are everywhere in nature. And I have never been able to go anywhere--a trail hike, a beach, even a parking lot--without watching the ground and tucking all the pretty pebbles into my pocket.

When I was young, the bar across the street from my parents’ business had a gravel driveway. And every time they spread fresh gravel, I’d be over there, picking through the granite shards and surreptitiously setting aside the sparkliest specimens.

When I was thirteen, I spent a Saturday morning with my church youth group learning how to make rosaries--the old fashioned kind, with each bead suspended on a pin of wire. There was something so meditative about bending and wrapping each piece of wire to snugly hold the bead, and something so satisfying about connecting all the links to make a beautiful chain.

Shortly afterwards, my parents bought a big bag of jewelry at an estate auction. Most of the pieces were broken, but I swiped my dad’s needle-nose pliers and went to work.

I fell in love with jewelry at that moment.

It was cheap costume jewelry, but to me it was a bag of treasure. Intricately carved little bone beads. Golden chatoyant tiger-eye. Sparkling faceted crystal. I took the necklaces and bracelets apart, broke them down to their constituent pieces, then recombined them in ever more elaborate ways.

To take something and then make something new out of it, simply for the joy of creation, is a marvelous way for the teenage mind to grow.

Jewelry making remained a fun hobby, an endeavor to keep my introverted self occupied, and every trip from our tiny town to the city was a good excuse to stop at Michael’s and find more materials to experiment with.

Then, college. Classes, studying, work, social life. Old hobbies faded away, to be replaced with real life.

And then years later, after graduation and marriage and motherhood, I found myself at an MLM party hosted by a coworker who was trying to sell jewelry.

The necklaces were beautiful, but I realized, as I flipped through this catalog of gemstones and silver, that these were not complex designs. Most, in fact, were quite simple and highlighted the natural beauty of the stones. And I could easily make them.

Thus my love affair with jewelry was reignited, as well as my love affair with rocks, and both blazed hotter than ever.

The Earth is rocks, thousands of types, of all colors and properties. While the rare ones are precious for their scarcity, the common ones are no less beautiful. All of the amazing diversity found in nature is echoed in its base layer.

To appreciate the chatoyancy of Labradorite is to admire the iridescent feathers on a mallard’s head. To marvel at the green-on-green of malachite is to treasure the birch leaves that flicker in the wind. And to contemplate the stripes on granite--formed deep within the Earth and brought to the surface across thousands of millennia--is to contemplate the roar of the ocean echoing time itself.

And so now I lose myself in the rush of creativity as I strive to bring out the beauty of the stones so that others can see them as I do. I often create with a purpose, making pieces that fit a theme and are destined for craft shows or custom work. But the best times are those when I can simply play, when I can gaze over the stones spread across my craft table, when I can create and combine without care.

For a little while the worries of life fall away and I am a thirteen-year-old rock hound again, experiencing beauty simply for the joy of it.