A new piece, and the first afternoon I wore it.
Wound five times, the first afternoon.
People assume someone who works with words wants quiet. I don't, particularly. The mind that chases the exact word, the one that survives being moved from one language into another, does not switch off at six o'clock, and I would not trade it if I could. I count in my sleep. I count the words I owe, the days until things, the stairs. Wanting the precise answer is not a burden I carry. It is closer to how I am built.
It only presses on me sometimes. A wet Tuesday, say. The kind of early summer afternoon when the air gives up and the room goes close and grey, and the part of me that will not stop turns from engine into weight, something sitting on the chest I can't name, and therefore can't fix.
Part of my work is finding the words for our new pieces before anyone else sees them. This was the afternoon I sat down to find the words for this one.
· · ·
I did not know how to use it, and I did not stop working to learn. I wound it around my wrist, five times, two cool weights of stone, and kept typing.
The guru bead, a conch spiral, and the dice beside it.
It was cold when it went on. Properly cold, the way a key is when you've left it out overnight. On a muggy afternoon, that small shock of cold was the first thing in hours that was not the deadline, and I came down a few degrees without deciding to. Then, slowly, the stone took my temperature and stopped being cold. I noticed I did not want to take it off.
I am a precise person, so I tried to be precise about why. Was I getting used to the weight? Was it the blue, does blue simply do this to some of us, for reasons no one has bothered to prove? Or was it only that the deep navy sat well against the cherry red of my nails, and I am vainer than I admit? I could not settle it. When I moved my wrist, the beads knocked together with a small, clean, glassy sound, and I gave up sourcing the feeling and listened to that instead.
· · ·
Here is the part I can't account for, and I have stopped trying.
As I began to write down what the afternoon felt like, the blue went somewhere. I only had the photographs, the ones everyone has seen, the sacred lakes, the mountains standing behind them, arriving now without being asked. Each one its own blue. The sky one blue, the water another, both of them completely still, in the way water is still only at altitude, where there is nothing left in the air to trouble it.
And for a moment, at my own desk, I had both. I did not stop counting, I could still feel the deadline ticking under everything. But the stillness of those lakes came and sat down beside it, and the two were not at war. A thread of something open and slow came into a room that had none of it, and I did not have to leave the room, or stop being myself, to feel it.
I felt better. Not fixed. Better. The weight was still there. I had simply stopped bracing against it, and let it sit, and it turned out to weigh less when I was not fighting it.
· · ·
The full strand, the length it counts to.
The piece is our Wisdom Awakening Conch and Dragon Lapis Lazuli 108 Mala. Deep blue lapis flecked with gold, strung by hand in Tibet on cotton cord, with a carved conch bead at the centre and a dragon guru bead below it. The dragon is the old image of stillness kept inside the chaos rather than away from it, holding your own centre while everything around you moves. Small beads shaped like dice are set along the strand. They are the old sign for trusting a path you cannot yet count out, which, for someone like me, is the whole difficulty and the whole point. Worn long for the hand, or wound four or five times at the wrist, where the weight does its quiet work.
I did not stop counting that afternoon. I doubt I ever will. I just got to be both things at once for a while, the one who counts, and the one who can watch a lake not move. I am still wearing it as I write this, and I think I will be for a long time.
View the Wisdom Awakening Conch and Dragon Lapis Lazuli 108 Mala
Tashi delek.
