'The Center Held'

Yeats wrote it in 1919, watching the world fall apart: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. He was wrong about the centre. Or rather — he was describing what happens when the centre is abandoned, when people stop tending the thing at the middle of everything. When someone tends it, the centre holds.

The interior of this ring is dark and dense — wine, magenta, crimson, heather, fern, the full abundance of a late-season garden pressing in from every direction. And at the center: a single small white rose. It has not been displaced by any of the other things pressing in. It holds its ground at the exact center of the composition. In alchemical tradition, the white rose is the albedo — the stage after the blackening where light begins to return. The centre, tended, holds.

This ring is for the woman who has been through the dark and knows exactly where her center is.