Paula Underwood, my Iroquois teacher, was fond of saying, “The amount of conflict you can incorporate into your circle is directly proportional to the amount of peace you will feel.”
Here’s some conflict I’ve let into my circle recently…
My Iroquois teacher Paula Underwood, held ten thousand years of stories and history in her head. She called them her “data base.” The stories were the life lessons of a small group of people that valued learning above all else. The stories were in pots in her head, literally. Her father had planted seeds timed to sprout in the last part of her life. I was there when they came up through her poetic voice.
The Tucson Gem and Mineral Show is the largest of its kind in the world. Every hotel in Tucson is taken over. Glamour of the biggest and most expensive gems in the world, everything that glitters under the sun. What I see when I walk in there is a slag pile, miles long and who knows how high. Besides the environmental damage, how much ill treated labor was needed to create this mess?
It is just like going into a supermarket and seeing all the meat wrapped in plastic without the visit to the slaughterhouses of Greeley Colorado, or going to the gas pump without seeing the caskets come back from Iraq. Jewelry is no different than any other commodity.
