'Before the Words'

The psychologist Silvan Tomkins spent his career demonstrating that affect — feeling — precedes cognition. We feel first. We know what we feel before we know what we think. The words arrive later, as the best translation we can manage of something that was already completely true before language got to it. The feeling that preceded the words was not less accurate than the words. It was more.

This ring leads with feeling. The deep blue-purple ground, the large flowers that take up the whole field — this ring is in the middle of something before it arrives. When the hand wearing this ring gestures, the room doesn’t think: it feels. People who were making conversation suddenly want to say true things. Something has been spoken before a word has left her mouth.

This ring is for the woman who has always felt things before she knew their names.