{"product_id":"ready-to-ship-on-the-pyre-of-memory","title":"* Ready to Ship * On the Pyre of Memory.","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePlease note\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cspan\u003e: \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cb\u003eThis necklace is Ready to Ship and will leave the studio in 1 - 5 business days. The chain is 30 inches in length. If you would like a different chain length you must email us with your desired length immediately after placing your order. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eIf you purchase this item with any other jewel, please be aware that our jewelry is handmade to order and takes approximately 6-8 weeks to create before shipping, meaning your Ready to Ship jewel will ship with the rest of your order. This cuts down on multiple shipping costs for you, and unnecessary waste for the environment.  \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOnce upon a time, on the evening of September 3, 2018 to be exact, I was driving in the dark on a Minnesota road with Aaron listening to the news when word broke of the Natural Museum of Brazil being on fire ….an American NPR reporter was on the scene where thousands of people were gathered to watch the Imperial Palace, hundreds of years old, and which housed millions of ancient artifacts and documents, the memory of Latin America, being incinerated as if on a giant pyre. Voices of grief in Portuguese crackled through the radio waves across the sea in the dark and I looked out the car window, onto the flat plains of the farm lands of America, and my heart caved in, in that particular way that only grief can incite. It was, and remains one of the most poignant moments of ‘contact’ grief I have ever experienced in my life for a significant loss that wasn’t the loss of human life. As I write this news reports come in during a time of another moment of contact grief as unfathomable losses of human life are still being counted in Turkey and Syria after a devastating earthquake.\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eInside this museum, which was once home to royalty in its pale yellow walls and vast gardens, were recordings of indigenous languages existing only there, and now lost forever ~ Egyptian mummies carefully wrapped in layers of linen and prepared with talismans for the afterlife, cremated like the modern dead~ indestructible meteorites which survived the fire due to their alien anatomy~ a Roman fresco from Pompeii that had ironically survived the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius but now reduced to ash ~5 million butterflies, their vivid and iridescent wings evaporated in the night air like ingredients in a spell….\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBut what I was most haunted by was the bones of Luzia, the ancient young woman found in a cave in the 1970’s, her skull and part of her skeleton a marvel of our history on the planet - evidence of our ancientness - considered to be 11,000 years old + a vast amount of time to consider our humanness, our consciousness, our aliveness, yet also, our newness as a species when considering the age of the planet and how she was also housed in the same palace as the bones of a dinosaur.\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese bones, these relics, these objects, these specimens, all gathered together in a cauldron of memory that caught fire in the night - \u0026amp; yet \u0026amp; yet, Luzia remained - her skull, miraculously housed in an iron cabinet, lived on yet again. This woman and her skull has haunted me through these remaining years ~ the ideas of cultural memory ~ of ancestry and the earliest humans ~ how we are all truly related and connected ~ how ancient and also new we are as a species ~ how objects and memory and ourselves can be lost to time, to fire, to tragedy in quicksilver moments has remained like a ghost ~ surfacing in moments of sadness, but also in moments of joy ~ to remember this is all we have ~ this time right now~ is an unnamable fear and an unnameable pleasure ~ it is beautiful and grotesque all at once ~ a tension I’m always chasing in everything with my time on this realm…\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is a strange kind of grief, to grieve for objects and buildings, to grieve for a timeline we did not live in, to grieve for a woman and a humanness alien to our modern senses. There is a doubleness happening here for me, and maybe for you too, in this moment and perhaps in other experiences of sadness and grief, or in other inkier, murkier, less ‘acceptable’ emotions pushed down into the shadow realms of your self - when two kinds of death happen, a death of a past we did not partake in but are joined to, and then a true death of the bones and relics and objects when they are lost forever to neglect, to war, to natural disaster, when parts of our past and our collective memory is lost forever. \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo push this further, there is also a deep grief when we are lost from the connection of ourselves, be that to our ancestry and culture because we are taught to be disconnected from it by way of immigration, or perhaps because we do not know it at all by way of adoption or other separation from family through no choice or cause of our own. \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis talismanic vessel also represents the ‘double’ grief we feel when we lose someone - we grieve the loss of the person, who they were to us, the memories of them surfacing, sometimes with joy, and other times with a kind of sharp flame that burns through us quickly like a wildfire - and the second grief, the grief of the death of who we were when they were alive and how we must now be in their absence ….how we are now completely different and how, much like the museum, we must rebuild after the devastation. \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMay you put these feelings and felt senses on the alchemical pyre to be burned away, to be transformed - because there is nothing else to be done, the grief must be transmuted.\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e The shape of this coin mimics the ‘pressed penny’ souvenir - suggesting the relics we collect when we travel to different places and collect mementos of memory of our time spent elsewhere. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e~ ~ ~ ~ \u003cmeta charset=\"UTF-8\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv dir=\"ltr\"\u003eBack in 2017\/2018 I started sketching \u0026amp; dreaming on ideas for an Oracle deck I wanted to make with my husband Aaron Horkey that was never to be as A). there are plenty in existence already B). it’s an extremely time \u0026amp; all consuming project if done the way he \u0026amp; I would have liked to have brought it into the world. Still, the ideas haunted me, the sketches \u0026amp; notes lived in my notebooks like embers which raged like wildfires in my sleep \u0026amp; cornering me at surprising moments in my waking hours. Considering this ~ I thought I could make these ideas into ‘divination coins’ instead ~ a deck of cards spread out over time to jewels ~ a narrative thread woven through silver talismanic vessels that could be worn and pressed against parts of the body, held, slept with, rather than made of paper and flipped over - fanned out in brief moments ~ something that resonated deeper than the original meaning I dreamed up for them. \u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv id=\"m_-6775737154647394597AppleMailSignature\" dir=\"ltr\"\u003e~ I started to think of Ancient coins ~ of the many ‘values’ coins have had ~ grave goods, objects to collect over the ages- coins for the ferryman ~ objects that outlast us, ancestral objects ~ ancestral currency…..\u0026amp; I wanted to make my own that held a talismanic and personal value rather than monetary value that could then potentially hold a talismanic \u0026amp; personal narrative value to its new wearers….each of these three ‘coins’ are struck with extremely personal significance and I'm please to introduce the first three an ongoing series.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cstrong data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eDetails:\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e- 26mm at it's widest \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e- 57mm from top to bottom ( including jump ring )\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e- Shown on Jess and Miguel with a 30 inch chain\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e- Pendant, chain, jump rings, and clasp are all solid Sterling Silver \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003ehand oxidized to achieve our favorite shade of stormy gray and then highlighted to reveal the bright luminous silver beneath\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e***IMPORTANT***\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e              \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eVisit the Policy Page to make an educated and informed purchase \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.bloodmilkjewels.com\/pages\/policy\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eHERE\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\u003cspan data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eIf you have further questions, we are always here to serve you in a kind and timely manner: via bloodmilkjewels@gmail.com\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Blood Milk Jewels","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45724799566073,"sku":null,"price":350.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0264\/9287\/files\/bm_product_11434176_ef.jpg?v=1706193446","url":"https:\/\/www.bloodmilkjewels.com\/products\/ready-to-ship-on-the-pyre-of-memory","provider":"Blood Milk Jewels","version":"1.0","type":"link"}