The Jeweler
a collaboration between Ana Noble and Nica Celly
The jeweler took three months to build the karma wheel.
Of granite,
The size of a tractor tire.
She invited 15 friends and put them on a bus to an abandoned ridge to witness its atomization.
She lifted the wheel onto its side and rolled it off the edge.
Its body exploded into a million little pieces. We all ran down to collect the embedded jewels like pinata candy.
I got a little rhomboid and put it in my pocket.
I kept a fire at night in that moment of life, lighting up what was dry, and letting it burn as I slept.
The rhomboid found a home in the center of that fire, flames lapping around it til dawn.
In the morning, I raked the coals.
The rhomboid was still there.
Every night for 13 nights, I kept that rhomboid in the center of the fire.
Every morning, when I raked the coals, I witnessed its color change: First, from black, then to deep sea blue, and deep ruby, amber, and on the 13th morning:
Gold. Curious, I put it in the fire on that night.
On the 14th morning, when I raked the coals,
it was gone.
All the while, the smoke from the fire lifted, met the clouds, and cooled them.
It rained.
Feeling the rain, and the mist that accompanied it, I pinched a bit of ash from the coals and took it to my lips. I tasted what was true: there was no karma left.
The field of precipitation met my body, my skin: my protection.
My immediate insides were calm.
And deeper in - the mind - with all of its electricity of thought and feeling: safe.
I danced a jig, and slowed to become certain my mind wasn’t making up stories: that what I perceived was real,
And indeed it was.
Perceptions of inside and outside of inside - a keen looking - allowed a knowing of fascia from flesh, separation of bone and connective tissue: see, each has its roles:
Who moves. Who holds. Who cushions. Who reflexes and how - from neck bone to breast bone to soft tissue, and back into the central system.
Curling curfew to the central fire: the agni.
Off the mountain into a million pieces we scatter and transmute into raindrops,
to wash ourselves over and over again: a mantra of freedom.
From the totality of the mind.