Spending the afternoon with this beauty in preparation for my visit to the Musée de Cluny le Monde Médiéval during the Paris leg of my France excursion.
So looking forward to taking in these tapestries for myself.
Tag: amresearching
Lapidary of Sacred Stones & My Grandmother’s Amber
I’m finishing up research on Medieval and Renaissance uses of stones of all kinds (even stones like gall stones and kidney stones) for the purpose of religious worship (including all Abrahamic religions), healing, and protection.
The stones you see in the picture are a string of raw amber my grandmother brought back for me from Częstochowa, Poland. She made a pilgrimage to see The Black Madonna of Częstochowa 30 years ago and returned a very different woman after that experience. They carried so much energy in them that I locked them away and lost track of them until recently.
According to the lapidary, amber or Cymbra as it was called is thought to be engendered from the breath of a whale, found at the bottom of the sea and the mouth of rivers. It guards the virtues of the body, sharpens the memory, and banishes sorrows.
In The Thousand and One Nights, all sorts of stones are pitched into the sea by a fountain, swallowed by fish and spit back out as amber.
Pliny offered us a fanciful creation story, stating that amber was produced by the sun’s rays that would leave it behind as they struck the ground at the end of the day.
In folk medicine, it is used to tranquilize the mind.
Amber plays a key role in The Woman On The Wall, As does the Cult of the Black Madonna.
More on that soon.
Day 31 – Productivity& The Collapse of Time
Productive days are the best kind. The total absorption into material and storytelling becomes meditative. The devotion to ideas and evolution of that story sparks a magic. When it was all over, I couldn’t even remember which Writer’s Studio day it was.
In the midst of it all, my brother and I even managed to fit in an Insta chat on living magical lives.
Both seekers, we’ve dabbled—or even more than dabbled—in a wide range of ideas, practices, and philosophical perspectives. He just relocated to the remote island of Wrangell, Alaska, and the world is on fire for him right now. The conversation took on its own personality, moving through fishing, friends, lost civilizations, myth, the spirit of the land, and our own sense of self.
I realized that days in which articles are read, poetry is shared, a friend leaves you a sweet voice message, your brother answers the call when you have something bizarro to share with him, are true source magic.
From that, the construct of time drops away and all that lives in that space is a direct channel to the imagination.
Words hold the greatest of power.
Here’s a quick wrap-up from my crazy-productive day: