We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter.

To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know – unless it be to share our laughter. We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.”

James Kavanaugh.

Mixed with gold it is regal and beautiful

My newest creation is ‘LUA’

Sweet-water pearls with Tibetan silver and a little bit of Moon Magic.

I don”t usually like lava rock, but the colour of this one is so soothing that I had to do something with it.

What do you think?

I used to have some little bad days, and I kept them in a little box. And one day, I threw them out into the yard. “Oh, it’s just a couple little innocent bad days.” Well, we had a big rain. I don’t know what it was growing in but I think we used to put eggshells out there and coffee grounds, too.

Don’t plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me. Choke those little bad days. Choke ‘em down to nothin’. They’re your days. Choke ‘em!”

Tom Waits

No, not me.

One of the more unusual hobbies I have taken up is jewellery making.  I needed something to relieve the boredom of not working, other than shooting at things with arrows.

I wasn’t sure how good I would but I have taken to it like a duck to water and this is my newest creation. I named it ice queen because the inspiration was a photograph of a icy, but sunny, day.

If it does not sell within a week,  it is mine. I love it.

PS:  It sold. Ahhh well…..

(I know I’m not Hale Berry, but we all take inspiration from somewhere!)

Stress. A word we hear every day but have no concept of what it can actually do to the human body.

I have had recent experience of the joys of ‘stress’. One of which was losing a lot of my hair. I have never had amazing hair. My mother had stunning black, curly locks, my father had fine blonde (almost white), resulting in my fine, fluffy dark brown. I think the hair gene had taken a coffee break when I was being conceived! One ex kindly called it ‘your messy hair’.  Some nerve, coming from a guy who is going bald!!

Thankfully it is now returning, but it has completely changed colour. Instead of dark it is returning a sort of silvery white/grey. This was somewhat depressing at first and resulted in much wrangling with a multitude of hair dyes to hide it, never really successfully, a little bit always managed to ‘escape’.

After much thought and many frustrating hours with hair dye, I have decided to ‘go commando’ so to speak. No more fighting with packages promising ‘rich, enhancing colour’. I shall wait and see what nature has decided I shall look like. Brave words coming from someone who has spent a lifetime in the clutches of L’Oreal and other such promisers of wonder.

I’m feeling good about it today. I may change my mind tomorrow, but that’s a woman’s prerogative…..

I love things with a wild passion, extravagantly. I cherish tongs, and scissors; I adore cups, hoops, soup turrents, not to mention of course- the hat. I love all things, not only the grand, but also the infinitely small: the thimble, spurs, dishes, vases.

Oh, my soul, the planet is radiant, teeming with pipes in hand, conductors of smoke; with keys, saltshakers, and well, things crafted by the human hand, everything- the curve of a shoe, fabric, the new bloodless birth of gold, the eyeglasses, nails, brooms, watches, compasses, coins, the silken plushness of chairs. Oh humans have constructed a multitude of pure things: objects of wood, crystal, cord, wondrous tables, ships, staircases.

I love all things, not because they might be warm or fragrant, but rather because- I don’t know why, because this ocean is yours, and mine: the buttons, the wheels, the little forgotten treasures, the fans of feathery love spreading orange blossoms, the cups, the knives, the shears, everything rests in the handle, the contour, the traces of fingers, of a remote hand lost in the most forgotten regions of the ordinary obscured. I pass through houses, streets, elevators, touching things; I glimpse objects and secretly desire something because it chimes, and something else because, because it is as yielding as gentle hips, something else I adore for its deepwater hue, something else for its velvety depths.

Oh irrevocable river of things. People will not say that I only loved fish or plants of the rain forest or meadow, that I only loved things that leap, rise, sigh, and survive. It is not true: many things gave me completeness. They did not only touch me. My hand did not merely touch them, but rather, they befriended my existence in such a way that with me, they indeed existed, and they were for me so full of life, and they lived with me half-alive, and they will die with me half-dead.

Not quite in the way it seems….