Sometimes you don’t know what you need until you get it.

I feel that way about my new necklace. I don’t wear a lot of jewelry—often none—for reasons I can’t easily articulate. I had a mother who didn’t adorn herself, and perhaps her refusal to work a little bit to sparkle is now also mine. 

Do you need jewelry to sparkle? Of course not. But does a fastening a beautiful bracelet around your wrist raise your wow vibration? Seems likely. Otherwise, really, why would we bother? Some people tie the thinnest red thread around their wrist as protection, as a show of devotion, as a kind of prayer. We make our fears and dreams into objects that remind us of the body, of spirit, of love. 

 And if you wear no jewelry can you still have all those things: the body, the spirit, love? Of course. Can you travel across country without a car? Yes. You can get on a bike. You can walk. In Breakfast at Tiffany, shiny, gorgeous Holly Golightly ate her croissant while windowdreaming at Tiffany, and, unadorned, she was perfection.

 As are you.

 And still. We are creative beings and we adorn our body because we can. 

 My screenplay writing partner Antonia always wore a silver wing necklace, and as we worked I would look at it sometimes, think about it, consider what it meant to wear a single wing. I thought it was emblematic of Antonia’s wild spirit, her strong will, and I admired her for wearing her strength as something she could touch and claim. 

 I learned once that my birth mother’s favorite animal (I can’t check my facts here, so just bear with me) was a turtle. This made sense to me. A turtle can shell at will, disappear, shelter. Not that long ago, I swam with turtles in Maui, and they seemed like a different species from the turtles I had grown up seeing by ponds and lakes. The Hawaii turtles were like seabirds, their fins so long and graceful, so wing-like. 

 I want to be winged, not shelled. 

 When my mother died, I got love tattooed on my wrist in her handwriting like I was a living tombstone. Her body was empty of spirit, and I missed her fiercely. Language bound us, our love of reading, of writing, and because we had struggled to run the course of love purely between us as mothers and daughters often do, as adopted daughters and their adoptive mothers often do, I wanted to keep at it, keep at this love game, get it right. 

 So I put it on my body. Love. 

 I love my mother now more that she is gone. 

 I wish I could have one more day with her so I could try out my new communication skills, play out the confidence I have found since writing a book about my life. Maybe I would be too much for her as I was before, but at least I could try, and maybe, just maybe, the candle of love expressed would burn that more brightly between us for her short visit and I would get to feel like I had lived out my heart. 

 But I am writing this post to tell you about my new treasure.

 My friend Julie Lindsay is an artist. When she was younger, she made all her own clothes. Then she had a baby, and her time was no longer solely hers. She was a wife and mother and had a very successful career in retail. And then she retired, and she got to play. For years she’d been collecting jewels, baubles, beautiful objects that one day she could make something out of, and now, retired, she started making talismans for herself. The first was inspired by a story she heard about farmers removing cow’s horns in order to better control the animal. 

So Julie made a horned cow’s head made of the removed horn and crowned it with silver flowers. And then she did more: she decorated the back of the piece with embossed vining flowers. What a thing, to see something beautiful and then to turn it over and see that even the hidden side was made special! 

Her husband is the longest tenured lead singer of Santana, and maybe music just pours out of her life, because her pieces sing. 

This is what I want to tell you: I asked her if she’d make me a wing necklace. I wanted something to mark the time I’ve spent at Spirit Hill Farm, something to mark my flight to Boston, into the writing the remarkable story of Kathy Delaney-Smith, a personal hero of mine. I wanted something bold. Something with heft. Something I could hold onto while I thought, worried, loved, dreamed. There’s a small black crown above the wing, and this symbolizes the dreams I used to have as a child that I was actually a princess, and that one day my real mother the queen would come get me. 

That dream still lives in me, only now my real mother is me, and I will find myself in the dark and I will listen to all I have to say; I will listen to my heart because this is a skill I now carry: I’m heart aware, fully alive I want to risk it all.

I want to have flown the coop, completely.

I love my wing. I love the black crown. I love that a women who has music in her bones made this piece for me. The word talisman means anything whose presence exercises a remarkable or powerful influence on human feelings or actions.

What if we can create the life we want by living it? I mean, it sounds so stupidly obvious, and yet, for all these years, I watched someone else wear a wing I wished I had, also.

It takes work to be yourself sometimes.

And good friends.

If you want Julie to make a special talisman for you, let me know. I’ll connect you.