MY JOURNEY
There was a version of me that would never have made anything.
She was present for years. Drinking daily, disappearing quietly, the way you can disappear without anyone naming it, including yourself. No direction. No presence. No future she could picture. Nothing that looked like a bench, or a torch, or a piece of silver pulled into the shape of the moon.
That version of me ended at the close of 2015.
What came after was not a triumph. It was just work. The slow, unglamorous, sacred work of finding out who I actually was underneath everything I had used to cover her. 2016, 2017, 2018. Daily meditation. Yoga. Sitting still long enough to hear what had always been there. Building the inner architecture before I had any idea what it would eventually hold.
Somewhere in those years, I encountered a phrase.
As Above, So Below.
I had seen it before. In books. In spells. In incantations. In the margins of things written by people who understood that the cosmos and the self are not separate. I had moved through those words without knowing they had a name, without knowing they belonged to a philosophy, without knowing they were already mine.
When I finally understood what they meant, something clicked into place. Not like learning. Like belonging. Like finding a seat at a table I had always been meant to sit at, surrounded by every book and spell and little thing I had ever felt pulled toward, finally gathered under one roof.
I did not find Hermetic philosophy. I remembered it.
In 2019, I picked up the tools.
The spiritual work needed a physical language, and silversmithing was it.
The belief that what lives in the cosmos lives in us. That what we carry on the body is never just decoration. That a piece of metal, worked by hand with intention, can be a small mirror of something much larger. I did not arrive at these ideas through study. I arrived at the bench already carrying them. The silverwork was simply where they finally became visible.
When I hold a finished piece now, I sometimes cry.
Not from sentiment. From memory. From knowing exactly how far the woman holding it had to travel before she was capable of making it. There was nothing before getting sober. No direction, no presence, no version of this life that was possible. And now there is a bench, and a torch, and stones chosen by intuition, and a philosophy with a name I finally know, and a line of work that is the most honest thing I have ever made.
This is what From the Infinite Jewelry is.
It is the outer expression of an inner journey that began the moment I chose to come back to myself.