'Strength and Beauty'

The old stories kept saying it as though they were opposites — strength or beauty, one or the other, the warrior or the ornament. The folklore got this wrong in a very old and persistent way. Strength and beauty are not a choice. They are a description. The things that survive are not the hardest things or the prettiest things. They are the things that grew into themselves so completely that there was nothing left for circumstances to get purchase on.

The pendant holds pressed botanicals in dark resin — the garden itself, sealed and permanent — and it hangs from a necklace of aventurine and blue spot jasper beads, with one red aventurine bead among them, just to mix it up. The stones are old in the way that stones are old: formed under pressure, colored by mineral circumstance, polished by time. The botanical resin pendant holds what grew. The stones hold what was made. Both are the same story.

For the one who never had to choose between them because she always understood they were the same thing.