On mixed feelings, imagination, and making room for what cannot be easily resolved.
As I prepare for another month of shows, I notice two very different feelings living beside each other.
I am excited to go.
And I want to stay home.
I want the movement, the conversations, and the moment when someone tries on a piece and recognizes something of herself in it.
I also want my own bed. My morning coffee. The familiar rhythm of the studio. The comfort of not packing my life into cases and carrying it somewhere else.
On the morning of a show, the cases are lined up by the door before the sun is fully awake. I check the tags one more time. I make coffee for the road. I look around at the kitchen, the garden, and the animals settling into their familiar places, and part of me wonders why I would ever want to leave.
Then I arrive.
I unfold the table covering. I place the first necklace on its stand. Someone stops, reaches for a stone, and begins telling me something about her life.
And I remember why I came.
For a long time, I thought one of these feelings had to be more true than the other.
Perhaps I was not grateful enough if part of me wanted to stay home. Perhaps I was not adventurous enough if travel sometimes tired me. Perhaps loving the work meant I should love everything the work required.
But both feelings are true.
I love going.
I love returning.
One does not cancel the other.
More Than One Feeling
We are often uncomfortable when different feelings appear at the same time.
We want to know which one is correct.
Am I happy or sad?
Do I want to stay or leave?
Is this ending a loss or a beginning?
Do I need to hold on or let go?
We imagine that clarity will come when one feeling finally defeats the other. We choose a side because the space between two truths can feel uncertain.
But life rarely offers us only one clean emotion at a time.
We can love someone and still need distance.
We can be deeply grateful and completely exhausted.
We can know that a change is right and still grieve what it asks us to leave behind.
We can feel strong in one part of our lives and terribly tender in another.
The heart is capable of holding more than one truth.
Perhaps the difficulty is not that we are confused.
Perhaps we are trying to make something simple that was never meant to be.
The Space Between
There is a moment in making jewelry when two stones seem unable to belong together.
One is warm and luminous. The other is darker, cooler, or more opaque. Each is beautiful, but the relationship between them has not yet appeared.
I could choose one and remove the other.
Sometimes that is the right decision.
But sometimes I stay with them a little longer.
I move them.
I change what surrounds them.
I introduce another color, a small gold element, or a little more space.
Then something shifts.
The stones have not changed. Neither has surrendered its nature. But a relationship has formed between them, and suddenly the contrast that seemed like a problem becomes the reason the piece feels alive.
There are moments in our lives that ask for this same kind of attention.
Not an immediate decision.
Not a forced agreement.
A willingness to remain with what feels unresolved until we can see more than we saw at first.
What Imagination Makes Possible
Once we stop asking one truth to defeat the other, imagination becomes useful.
We often think of imagination as fantasy or escape. But imagination can also be the ability to see beyond the choices we have already been given.
When fear speaks, it usually offers only two options.
Stay or go.
Hold on or let go.
Be strong or fall apart.
Imagination asks whether there might be another way to understand what is happening.
For me, that other way does not require choosing between the work and home.
I can leave for a show and still admit that leaving asks something of me. I can love the conversations and need quiet afterward. I can let myself miss home without turning that feeling into evidence that I should not have gone.
Sometimes imagination does not give us a dramatic third choice.
Sometimes it simply gives us a kinder way to inhabit the choice we have already made.
Strength can include falling apart in the presence of someone we trust. Letting go does not require us to stop carrying what mattered. Moving forward does not ask us to pretend the past meant nothing.
The new possibility is not always a compromise between two sides. It may be something neither side could see on its own.
But we usually cannot find it while rushing to resolve the tension.
We have to give another understanding time to appear.
Ceremony Gives Shape to Both
This may be part of why ceremony matters so much to me.
Ceremony gives form to experiences that contain more than one truth.
A wedding celebrates a beginning while acknowledging that life will never again be exactly as it was.
A memorial holds grief and gratitude in the same room.
A departure contains excitement and sorrow.
A homecoming reminds us that we can return to a familiar place as someone who has been changed by leaving it.
Even adornment can hold opposing things.
A piece of jewelry may express who we are while protecting something private. It can be beautiful and grounding. Ancient in material and entirely personal in meaning.
Ceremony does not always resolve these contradictions.
It gives us somewhere to place them.
It allows joy and grief, fear and courage, endings and beginnings to sit beside one another without requiring one to disappear.
When Both Truths Matter
Sometimes the strongest conflicts in our lives are not between right and wrong.
They are between two things we care about.
The desire to be useful and the need to rest.
The wish to protect someone and the knowledge that they must find their own way.
The life we have built and the life that may now be calling us.
The person we have been and the person we are becoming.
When we choose too quickly, we may silence something that still has wisdom for us.
This does not mean we never make decisions. Life asks us to choose every day.
But a decision made after listening to both truths is different from one made simply to escape the discomfort of not knowing.
Sometimes the tension itself is telling us that there is more to see.
A Small Practice for Two Truths
When you find yourself caught between different feelings, try naming them without immediately deciding which one should win.
Write two sentences:
One true thing is...
Another true thing is...
Let both sentences exist.
Notice what happens in your body when you read each one.
Notice which truth you usually defend and which one you tend to dismiss.
Then ask:
What becomes possible if I do not force either truth to disappear?
You do not need to produce an answer.
The practice is not about solving your life in a few quiet minutes. It is about making enough room for a deeper understanding to find you.
A Larger Way of Seeing
I will leave for the shows this month.
The cases will be packed. There will be coffee for the road. Part of me will come alive as the table begins to take shape, and another part will miss home before I have even left it.
I no longer need to make that feeling mean I have chosen the wrong life.
It means there is more than one place I love.
And when I return, the cases will come back into the studio. The animals will greet me. I will make coffee in my own kitchen the next morning and feel grateful to be home.
I will also know that, when the time comes, I will want to go again.
Maybe wholeness is not the moment when all our contradictions finally disappear.
Maybe it is the capacity to hold what is true without letting one truth erase another.
To remain present.
To keep looking.
And to trust that somewhere between the place we are leaving and the place we are returning to, another way of seeing may already be taking shape.
