Today, it’s our second installment in the series begun on this day last week, an exploration, on an individual level, of the pieces that make up the group collectively entitled “Gifts.” As I said then, these are taken in no order except the one that moves me to choose a given piece for the day. You can read about the genesis of this collection here.
Many of our indigenous cultures, like numerous others around the world, share origin stories involving concepts of emergence: from a darker world, a void of sorts, into a brighter, warmer, more welcoming one. Reaching the brighter world was not easy, to be sure, nor is this world itself especially easy. But it’s one where the blessing of daily life are evident, particularly in light of the lessons imparted on the journey from the void to the light. It’s also a blueprint for our own path, both tangible and spiritual: a reminder to live our lives in such a way that, one day, we may emerge into another kind of light, one animated by the Spirits . . . and the spirits of our ancestors.
It’s never a clear, unbroken path. It’s not meant to be. Ease does not facilitate learning, nor growth; it’s a route to complacency. It’s not as though there’s anything wrong with doing what works. But we are imperfect creatures, and we need to be shaken out of our stasis from time to time to make the changes necessary to evolve — individually, as persons, and collectively, as cultures.
It all begins, as they say, at the beginning: in that period of stasis, that sense of limbo, that comforting but not really comfortable balance that sustains living, but little else.
It sometimes requires pressure from without to get things moving. It requires animation.
I’ve written before about the label of animism as applied to our peoples, its inherent reductionism. It doesn’t lessen the utility of the family of words as a descriptor of activity, however. Separating it wholly from its use (and misuse) as a label for identity, culture, spiritual traditions, reduced to its most basic meaning, to animate means, quite simply, to bring to life. It can be literal, or metaphorical. It’s why we refer to human behavior that is dynamic, excited, yes, lively, as animated.
It’s a characteristic I see in this piece.
How? Two tiny little stones placed some distance apart, atop faceted silver wire . . . it probably doesn’t seem very lively to most people.
But it is in the very stones themselves, placed atop a precious metal formed and shaped as this strand is, that I see the stirrings of new life, of movement.
The stones are tiger’s eye.
It’s a poetic name for a metamorphic mineral: one created through external heat and pressure. There are now two theories of creation, one the long accepted conventional wisdom, the other new and considered controversial. To my mind, neither negates the other; both are possible, and both hint at the animation of new ways of existing brought about by outside stressors.
The accepted theory as to how tiger’s eye develops is one of pseudomorphism: the process by which a new and foreign substance flows into, over, around, and through gaps in another substance, overtaking it; when the space’s original occupant dies off or otherwise disintegrates, the new substance is left in the shape of the old. We’ve encountered this phenomenon already; it occurs with Carico Lake and Lone Mountain turquoise, where over eons, the turquoise is forced into the spaces of clamshells; when the clam itself died and its shell dissolved, millennia ago, the turquoise remained in its place, unaltered as turquoise, but in the shape of the clamshell. Tiger’s eye has long been thought to form in a similar manner, as a form of quartz that has overtaken a different mineral, fibrous crocidolite (also known as blue asbestos), dissolving and replacing it entirely as a pseudomorph. (The blue-gray stone called hawk’s eye is thought to be an example of incomplete pseudomorphism, where the blue crocidolite has not entirely dissolved, leaving the chatoyant bands of quartz and asbestos layered and merged together.)
There is a relatively new theory as to tiger’s eye’s formation, apparently dating to 2003. Under this framework, the process that occurs is not pseudomorphism, but something that manifest more like the incomplete version described above with regard to hawk’s eye, above — or like the simple formation of matrixed stones like turquoise: via metamorphic pressure, the quartz simply moves into open veins and seams and cracks in what will become the host rock, and the result is a compound of the host mineral and the new quartz, creating the banding effect seen in tiger’s eye.
As I said, neither negates the other. It seems to me entirely possible to have the mineral form either way, leaving a range of “purity” of tiger’s eye quartz, for lack of a better way of putting it. The part of the stone’s origin story that fascinates me is present in either version, and it is the fact of the external pressures creating an animating force that turns what was already there into something new.
And here, placed on this particular strand of delicate sterling silver wire, those stones do seem animated. The wire itself is shaped via external pressures, forced into measured facets that gleam in the light, caught by the stones’ own light and fire and enhancing their natural chatoyance, that cat’s-eye quality that gives them their bisected, marbled shine. The wire is its own path, one of full of beautiful distractions and diversions that make the journey longer and sometimes more difficult, yet provide their own animating effects that give fuller life (and lessons) to the whole experience.
It’s beauty created under extreme pressure, born in heat and the weight of heavy burdens carried over long distances of time. It is, to borrow language from our brother and sister Indians from lands on the other side of the earth, an endless cycle of birth and rebirth.
It is the animation that sets us on the next step of our journey.
~ Aji
Animation bangle bracelet: Sterling silver; tiger’s eye. $325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner
