The Power of Now

Have you read "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle? My friend and fellow artist Daryl Thetford suggested it to me. In ways it is a primer on meditation or simply quieting the mind chatter and simply "being." It has been helping me in fits and starts to get in touch with my feelings. I still haven't finished reading it... there's only so much I can digest at a time, and I feel like by the time I'm finished I will need to start it all over again! But that's the nature of the mind... it wants to grasp things when the whole point of the book is to let go of thought.

Well, one morning last week I woke up early and read several sections while enjoying a cup off coffee, listening to the birds flitting and chirping in my newly-pruned apple trees. I was reading about Silence and Space... of course, he says it best: "Just as no sound can exist without silence, nothing can exist without no-thing, without the empty space that enables it to be." and later in the same paragraph he quotes a line from the Buddhist "Heart Sutra" which is: "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form."

This struck a chord in me because of my jewelry forms. I love their inherent simplicity and complexity, and I especially love the space, volume, form of them (sometimes more than the wire itself). Most of my pieces don't have a "thing" inside of them because I want people to appreciate the beauty of space... which is a little abstract to explain and profess easily for a sale so some of my pieces do contain objects which create a focal point of their own. I've always said that making my jewelry is like meditation for me, and now I see how the objects themselves can be meditative as well.