HOW TO BEAD A ROGUE ELEPHANT The Musings Of A Jewelry Designer: An Introduction

To exist is to be. But what does that mean? To be what? How? Why? And you learn this isn’t so much as a Why. Just an Is. You make a life choice. You take responsibility for it. It shapes you, your values, your decision making, your directional compass, and prepares you for the next choice. And you become what you take responsibility for becoming next.

Through a very round-about way, I became a jewelry designer. It was nothing predestined. Not a requirement, an expectation or a goal. Something I fell into. Something I loved. So I kept making choices and taking responsibility for those choices to become a very literate, fluent, adaptable, successful jewelry designer.

To be is to exist. If I reverse this truism, then the perspective changes. The question, for me, eventually became What does it mean to exist as a jewelry designer. I think about that a lot. While I design each piece. While I make it. While I reflect on all the things I learned and experienced and tried and succeeded or failed along the way in order to design and make the piece I am working on.

And it’s become ever clearer to me that it is impossible to separate my life as a jewelry designer from all the other aspects of my life. To become the jewelry designer I am today, to have the insights…