| Golden Deer Lapidarium AMULETIC JEWELRY created by Joan Marie Mickelson |
| The Jasper Bead-seller |
Each July the intersection between two streets in our neighborhood is closed to traffic
for one day. Craftsmen and food hawkers lay out blankets, set up tables and booths and
display their merchandise. After market closes late in the afternoon musicians perform on a
small stage set in the center of the intersection. I had only intended to walk quickly to the
corner and home again, to purchase a loaf of bread and post a letter but the people who
crowded the sidewalks forced me to join their slow amble past the paintings of flowers and
sunsets and sturdy hand thrown pottery mugs and bowls.
Over the murmur of the crowd I heard a voice call, “Amulets for sale, amulets for
sale.” A man dressed in shabby denims and a colorfully dyed shirt sat upon his red blanket,
where he leaned against the wall of the bowling alley.
I leaned over to look at the small shiny pressed metal charms shaped as hearts, stars, a
Thor’s hammer, zodiac signs, decorative knots and interlocking triangles he had spread
upon his blanket. These miniature representations and occult symbols of things I held dear
drew my attention and evoked my desire to make them precious, to hang them about my
neck, put them in my pocket, or to rub between my fingers for luck and protection from
lightning strikes, the evil eye, a broken heart and my house from theft and fire.
“Do these work? Is there a guarantee?” I asked.
“Who has not felt fear? he said. Then his voice rose and he called, “Amulets for sale,
amulets for sale.”
I wandered away from his blanket. Who has not felt fear? I could fear the day, I could
fear the night. Would my fear make me any safer? Would an amulet make me feel safer?
Am I ever safe from fear?
I stopped before an unassuming vendor standing behind a small folding table, upon
which rested one shallow tray displaying an array of beads. Her long silvery hair fanned
across her shoulders in waves. She wore a full patterned skirt, a simple gathered blouse and
around her neck were draped several thick strands of beaded necklaces.
“My beads,” she said, “are inscribed by nature.” She pointed to each bead and
explained that small worlds within each one awakened the viewer to imaginary places,
earthy memories and immortal wisdom. The white and blue-green curls on a large round
bead became white caps swirling around boulders in a streambed. At her suggestion I
perceived an oak tree growing on the top of a knoll, its branches covered with golden
leaves in autumnal afternoon sunlight. She picked up a smaller oval pendant, placed it in her
palm, and held it so I could recognize the moon peeking through soft yellow and pink
clouds, spherical and mounded like bubbles.
“Time moves slowly within the stone.” She handed me a pendant in which I discerned a
blue green ocean wave fringed with foam where it edged the sandy shore.
As I held it and closed my eyes, I felt transported to a realm where time is immaterial
and the stone’s memory of its own beginnings revealed itself to me. As if the earth, wind,
water and fire were alchemists in their workshop, I watched as the wind scraped and
eroded the rocky crust. Slowly, so very slowly, water stirred layered sediments and fine
sands in shallow primordial seas and deep oceans. Wind and earth sprinkled and decorated
the mix with colorful pigments, shells and skeletons of tiny creatures that settled to the
bottom of the giant earthy bowl. In the alchemist’s hands death and decomposition were
reformed as beauty.
The earth’s artists pressed, pulled, squeezed and twisted the stratified, malleable stone,
kneading and rolling it, then heated it in a molten, fiery oven. When they were finished they
lifted the decorated, colorfully patterned jasper and strewed the pebbles and massive
boulders upon beaches and mountain tops. There is no end to the patterns and colors the
earth’s alchemists and artists fabricate.
As I opened my eyes I met the bead-seller’s intense gaze. Her translucent mauve colored
eyes matched the jasper beads in her collection.
“People have worn jasper for protection from their fears since ancient times,” she said.
I wasn’t sure I had heard her right. “Since people sought protection from fear, or
protection because they were afraid?”
“Like the layered sediment that formed jasper, the stones can inspire stories.
Fabricated by your imagination, the stories become stratified memories. Moments of
inspired fearlessness you experience today become the strata of your yesterdays. Did you
know; your past becomes your fate, your fate your future? You may replace the memories
of fear and dissolution with memories of courage you have created through stories. You
may alter your destiny, have faith in new beliefs you create through stories.”
She picked up a tetrahedral shield shaped stone and held it in the palm of one hand.
“Shall I tell you such a story now about a man who conquered fear and altered his future?”
Her finger traced the shapes as she described what she saw. “Here are red canyon
walls smooth and softly rounded as flesh. Black shadows move across the valley floor as
the sun passes above the southern wall and across the valley floor. The vertical lines are
ponderosa pines. A thin streak of quartz crystal represents a spring that pours from the rock
into a pool near the end of the valley and flows into a stream. Corn, beans, amaranth and
squash grow in small square plots delineated and set apart by rocks.
“At the entrance to the canyon a petroglyph has been picked out of the red sandstone
wall. The white lines form a rectangle, broad at the shoulders, narrow at the hips. Arms and
legs are indicated by thin lines, the head a square crowned with antelope horns. The figure
wears a necklace of dangling amulets. Next to this human shape is a round shield, its center
inscribed with concentric circles. An arrow point hovers above the shield.”
As she described the images I too saw the petroglyph. The simple lines indicating the
stick figure began to shift, to become dimensional. A man’s torso, head, arms and legs
formed and he was running. His feet were wrapped in the hide cut from a deer’s leg. Its
dew claws were sewn into the heel to impart the deer’s speed and agility so he might outrun
whatever lay behind him and leap across boulders and sticks lying in his path.
He ran into the folds of the red canyon, where the walls were soft as a mother’s flesh,
her stomach, large breasts and thick legs. He climbed toe holds carved into a single straight
pine log that leaned against a ledge. After he hastily pulled up his ladder he sat safely upon
the edge of the escarpment, upon his red mother’s lap, above the reach of spears and
arrows. He settled into the pleasure of his refuge among those with whom he had no need
of shields, arrows or spears. At his back, in the shadows cast by the overhang his family
members worked and played among the small rooms, dug and built into the base of the
shelf in the canyon wall.
His mother wove a coil of reeds into a basket. Other women ground maize with round
stones, pushing them back and forth in the shallow carved basins as they spoke quietly and
their children ran yelping between them. In the shelter of their home there was leisure to
create, to play and laugh. He picked up a deep conical basket, hung it from his shoulder
with the strap, descended the ladder and walked toward his gardens. There were beans
and a ripe squash to pick. Water needed to be carried but he walked away, toward the far
end of the canyon. He was worried by what he had seen on the plateau while he hunted
game. He had seen signs of people he did not recognize.
To protect their corn his father’s father had built granaries, hidden in the cliff crannies where
they were invisible to all but those who knew where to look. When he glanced up toward
them he felt secure. One granary, made from sticks and mud was hidden just below the old
pinion pine that leaned over the cliff face, its roots grasping the cracks and crevices, its
trunk shaped by the winds that never stopped blowing across the plateau.
An eagle perched upon the pinon’s twisted and sparsely needled branches. “You may
need to outrun danger as the deer does,” the eagle said, “but you may also fly as I do to
face that which you fear.”
As the wind plunged over the canyon walls and raced through the valley, he did not resist,
but felt as though a swirling gust could carry him, as if he could open his arms and soar as
the eagle does above the plateau. His feet only lightly touched the sandy canyon floor. With
the warm air in his chest he rose like smoke drifting from his mother’s hearth. Where before
he had struggled to climb the cliff face with scratched out toe and finger holds, it now
seemed so easy to lift into the sky.
As he looked down from above, the patches of black shadows contrasted against the
silver green cottonwoods and his family’s garden plants rooted in the red soil. The dry land
on the plateau above the canyon was seamed and creased, not unlike his father’s harshly
wrinkled face, fissured and shaped as dunes that looked like the series of ridged deposits
formed by waves after the creek in the canyon flooded. The sparse pinion and juniper that
frugally sucked water from the sand appeared as black dots scattered methodically across
the red, ochre and white streaked land.
A glowing mist twirled and spun around his legs and arms, dampened and cooled his
skin, formed a faint wisp behind him as he drifted. As the cloud parted he saw a deep
arroyo, a gash across the plateau, where raging waters had carved a twisted trail as a snake
does when it slithers across a sand dune. Recently after torrential rains the arroyo had been
full. Now it was empty but for the water left in shallow depressions. Gathered around these
blue glistening bowls he perceived an encampment. The people he saw below were far
away, so small, and as in need of water, game, shade, and shelter, as he was.
He floated above them. Perhaps they carried with them tanned furs and hides, the
products of their hunting as they wandered the plateau and the lands beyond. The rains had
been generous to his family. There was abundant squash and corn in their gardens. He and
his brothers could carry baskets full of cornmeal to trade with the people encamped below
in the arroyo.
Then as the air had borne him, it carried him back to his canyon and in gently twirling
spirals lowered him until the soles of his feet touched the red sandy soil on the canyon floor.
He awakened from his reverie and spotted a small pebble, curved like an eagle’s broad
wings lying at his feet. He picked up the stone and held it tightly in his fist.
When he returned to his dwelling he would wrap it with a string braided from yucca
fibers, tie it with a knot, and hang the stone around his neck. He now had faith that when he
was frightened he could see with the eyes of the broad winged eagle. Tonight, while sitting
in his kind refuge among the red folded canyon walls he would suggest to his family they
bring baskets of cornmeal and squash to offer in trade with the people whom he had seen
signs of today.
Sounds of water cascading down the canyon wall and the children’s laughter were
replaced by the sounds of the market, “Amulets for sale, amulets for sale.”
The bead seller curled her fingers around the shield shaped stone she held then handed
it to me. Like the earth’s four alchemists who refined the sediment that became jasper, the
distillation of her story, better than a bottled remedy, became an amulet against fear.
The musicians were warming up. The bead-seller covered her tray of beads and placed
it in her valise. She folded her table, took ribbons from her pack and tied them around her
wrists. She smiled broadly at me, her mauve blue eyes, transparent as the sky. “Come let
me tie ribbons around your wrists too.”
I extended my arms toward her as she tied yellow and red ribbons at my wrists and
showed me how I must wave them so they moved on the breeze I created with my
movement. My gracelessness was transformed. She lifted her arms. Her gaze became
distant and hovered over the heads of the shoppers. She spread her arms and began to step
in unison with the musical beat, drawn into the center of the intersection, to spiral and twirl
as she danced toward the musician’s stage.
I still grasped the shield shaped jasper in my fist. The bead-seller’s elegant spirals
guided me. I hovered above the street, rose upon the music, and the ribbons at our wrists
were like feathers in the wind.
for one day. Craftsmen and food hawkers lay out blankets, set up tables and booths and
display their merchandise. After market closes late in the afternoon musicians perform on a
small stage set in the center of the intersection. I had only intended to walk quickly to the
corner and home again, to purchase a loaf of bread and post a letter but the people who
crowded the sidewalks forced me to join their slow amble past the paintings of flowers and
sunsets and sturdy hand thrown pottery mugs and bowls.
Over the murmur of the crowd I heard a voice call, “Amulets for sale, amulets for
sale.” A man dressed in shabby denims and a colorfully dyed shirt sat upon his red blanket,
where he leaned against the wall of the bowling alley.
I leaned over to look at the small shiny pressed metal charms shaped as hearts, stars, a
Thor’s hammer, zodiac signs, decorative knots and interlocking triangles he had spread
upon his blanket. These miniature representations and occult symbols of things I held dear
drew my attention and evoked my desire to make them precious, to hang them about my
neck, put them in my pocket, or to rub between my fingers for luck and protection from
lightning strikes, the evil eye, a broken heart and my house from theft and fire.
“Do these work? Is there a guarantee?” I asked.
“Who has not felt fear? he said. Then his voice rose and he called, “Amulets for sale,
amulets for sale.”
I wandered away from his blanket. Who has not felt fear? I could fear the day, I could
fear the night. Would my fear make me any safer? Would an amulet make me feel safer?
Am I ever safe from fear?
I stopped before an unassuming vendor standing behind a small folding table, upon
which rested one shallow tray displaying an array of beads. Her long silvery hair fanned
across her shoulders in waves. She wore a full patterned skirt, a simple gathered blouse and
around her neck were draped several thick strands of beaded necklaces.
“My beads,” she said, “are inscribed by nature.” She pointed to each bead and
explained that small worlds within each one awakened the viewer to imaginary places,
earthy memories and immortal wisdom. The white and blue-green curls on a large round
bead became white caps swirling around boulders in a streambed. At her suggestion I
perceived an oak tree growing on the top of a knoll, its branches covered with golden
leaves in autumnal afternoon sunlight. She picked up a smaller oval pendant, placed it in her
palm, and held it so I could recognize the moon peeking through soft yellow and pink
clouds, spherical and mounded like bubbles.
“Time moves slowly within the stone.” She handed me a pendant in which I discerned a
blue green ocean wave fringed with foam where it edged the sandy shore.
As I held it and closed my eyes, I felt transported to a realm where time is immaterial
and the stone’s memory of its own beginnings revealed itself to me. As if the earth, wind,
water and fire were alchemists in their workshop, I watched as the wind scraped and
eroded the rocky crust. Slowly, so very slowly, water stirred layered sediments and fine
sands in shallow primordial seas and deep oceans. Wind and earth sprinkled and decorated
the mix with colorful pigments, shells and skeletons of tiny creatures that settled to the
bottom of the giant earthy bowl. In the alchemist’s hands death and decomposition were
reformed as beauty.
The earth’s artists pressed, pulled, squeezed and twisted the stratified, malleable stone,
kneading and rolling it, then heated it in a molten, fiery oven. When they were finished they
lifted the decorated, colorfully patterned jasper and strewed the pebbles and massive
boulders upon beaches and mountain tops. There is no end to the patterns and colors the
earth’s alchemists and artists fabricate.
As I opened my eyes I met the bead-seller’s intense gaze. Her translucent mauve colored
eyes matched the jasper beads in her collection.
“People have worn jasper for protection from their fears since ancient times,” she said.
I wasn’t sure I had heard her right. “Since people sought protection from fear, or
protection because they were afraid?”
“Like the layered sediment that formed jasper, the stones can inspire stories.
Fabricated by your imagination, the stories become stratified memories. Moments of
inspired fearlessness you experience today become the strata of your yesterdays. Did you
know; your past becomes your fate, your fate your future? You may replace the memories
of fear and dissolution with memories of courage you have created through stories. You
may alter your destiny, have faith in new beliefs you create through stories.”
She picked up a tetrahedral shield shaped stone and held it in the palm of one hand.
“Shall I tell you such a story now about a man who conquered fear and altered his future?”
Her finger traced the shapes as she described what she saw. “Here are red canyon
walls smooth and softly rounded as flesh. Black shadows move across the valley floor as
the sun passes above the southern wall and across the valley floor. The vertical lines are
ponderosa pines. A thin streak of quartz crystal represents a spring that pours from the rock
into a pool near the end of the valley and flows into a stream. Corn, beans, amaranth and
squash grow in small square plots delineated and set apart by rocks.
“At the entrance to the canyon a petroglyph has been picked out of the red sandstone
wall. The white lines form a rectangle, broad at the shoulders, narrow at the hips. Arms and
legs are indicated by thin lines, the head a square crowned with antelope horns. The figure
wears a necklace of dangling amulets. Next to this human shape is a round shield, its center
inscribed with concentric circles. An arrow point hovers above the shield.”
As she described the images I too saw the petroglyph. The simple lines indicating the
stick figure began to shift, to become dimensional. A man’s torso, head, arms and legs
formed and he was running. His feet were wrapped in the hide cut from a deer’s leg. Its
dew claws were sewn into the heel to impart the deer’s speed and agility so he might outrun
whatever lay behind him and leap across boulders and sticks lying in his path.
He ran into the folds of the red canyon, where the walls were soft as a mother’s flesh,
her stomach, large breasts and thick legs. He climbed toe holds carved into a single straight
pine log that leaned against a ledge. After he hastily pulled up his ladder he sat safely upon
the edge of the escarpment, upon his red mother’s lap, above the reach of spears and
arrows. He settled into the pleasure of his refuge among those with whom he had no need
of shields, arrows or spears. At his back, in the shadows cast by the overhang his family
members worked and played among the small rooms, dug and built into the base of the
shelf in the canyon wall.
His mother wove a coil of reeds into a basket. Other women ground maize with round
stones, pushing them back and forth in the shallow carved basins as they spoke quietly and
their children ran yelping between them. In the shelter of their home there was leisure to
create, to play and laugh. He picked up a deep conical basket, hung it from his shoulder
with the strap, descended the ladder and walked toward his gardens. There were beans
and a ripe squash to pick. Water needed to be carried but he walked away, toward the far
end of the canyon. He was worried by what he had seen on the plateau while he hunted
game. He had seen signs of people he did not recognize.
To protect their corn his father’s father had built granaries, hidden in the cliff crannies where
they were invisible to all but those who knew where to look. When he glanced up toward
them he felt secure. One granary, made from sticks and mud was hidden just below the old
pinion pine that leaned over the cliff face, its roots grasping the cracks and crevices, its
trunk shaped by the winds that never stopped blowing across the plateau.
An eagle perched upon the pinon’s twisted and sparsely needled branches. “You may
need to outrun danger as the deer does,” the eagle said, “but you may also fly as I do to
face that which you fear.”
As the wind plunged over the canyon walls and raced through the valley, he did not resist,
but felt as though a swirling gust could carry him, as if he could open his arms and soar as
the eagle does above the plateau. His feet only lightly touched the sandy canyon floor. With
the warm air in his chest he rose like smoke drifting from his mother’s hearth. Where before
he had struggled to climb the cliff face with scratched out toe and finger holds, it now
seemed so easy to lift into the sky.
As he looked down from above, the patches of black shadows contrasted against the
silver green cottonwoods and his family’s garden plants rooted in the red soil. The dry land
on the plateau above the canyon was seamed and creased, not unlike his father’s harshly
wrinkled face, fissured and shaped as dunes that looked like the series of ridged deposits
formed by waves after the creek in the canyon flooded. The sparse pinion and juniper that
frugally sucked water from the sand appeared as black dots scattered methodically across
the red, ochre and white streaked land.
A glowing mist twirled and spun around his legs and arms, dampened and cooled his
skin, formed a faint wisp behind him as he drifted. As the cloud parted he saw a deep
arroyo, a gash across the plateau, where raging waters had carved a twisted trail as a snake
does when it slithers across a sand dune. Recently after torrential rains the arroyo had been
full. Now it was empty but for the water left in shallow depressions. Gathered around these
blue glistening bowls he perceived an encampment. The people he saw below were far
away, so small, and as in need of water, game, shade, and shelter, as he was.
He floated above them. Perhaps they carried with them tanned furs and hides, the
products of their hunting as they wandered the plateau and the lands beyond. The rains had
been generous to his family. There was abundant squash and corn in their gardens. He and
his brothers could carry baskets full of cornmeal to trade with the people encamped below
in the arroyo.
Then as the air had borne him, it carried him back to his canyon and in gently twirling
spirals lowered him until the soles of his feet touched the red sandy soil on the canyon floor.
He awakened from his reverie and spotted a small pebble, curved like an eagle’s broad
wings lying at his feet. He picked up the stone and held it tightly in his fist.
When he returned to his dwelling he would wrap it with a string braided from yucca
fibers, tie it with a knot, and hang the stone around his neck. He now had faith that when he
was frightened he could see with the eyes of the broad winged eagle. Tonight, while sitting
in his kind refuge among the red folded canyon walls he would suggest to his family they
bring baskets of cornmeal and squash to offer in trade with the people whom he had seen
signs of today.
Sounds of water cascading down the canyon wall and the children’s laughter were
replaced by the sounds of the market, “Amulets for sale, amulets for sale.”
The bead seller curled her fingers around the shield shaped stone she held then handed
it to me. Like the earth’s four alchemists who refined the sediment that became jasper, the
distillation of her story, better than a bottled remedy, became an amulet against fear.
The musicians were warming up. The bead-seller covered her tray of beads and placed
it in her valise. She folded her table, took ribbons from her pack and tied them around her
wrists. She smiled broadly at me, her mauve blue eyes, transparent as the sky. “Come let
me tie ribbons around your wrists too.”
I extended my arms toward her as she tied yellow and red ribbons at my wrists and
showed me how I must wave them so they moved on the breeze I created with my
movement. My gracelessness was transformed. She lifted her arms. Her gaze became
distant and hovered over the heads of the shoppers. She spread her arms and began to step
in unison with the musical beat, drawn into the center of the intersection, to spiral and twirl
as she danced toward the musician’s stage.
I still grasped the shield shaped jasper in my fist. The bead-seller’s elegant spirals
guided me. I hovered above the street, rose upon the music, and the ribbons at our wrists
were like feathers in the wind.