A Talisman
Our collected keepsakes, found treasures from nature, mementos from travels, ephemera…these objects hold meaning for us, like bookmarks we tuck between our best loved pages. When we gather these elements together in a deliberate way, we affirm their significance. We add a deeper layer of meaning. In our retelling of their stories, these artifacts offer up memories, and the feelings and insights they hold for us. We might be archiving photographs, or assembling relics into an artwork or a scrapbook or a collection, or sorting through old letters…
I joined a workshop with Shona Wilson, about creating a personal talisman. Her preliminary instructions were to gather our significant treasures from stowed memorabilia; to fossick through our collections of found and hoarded pickings, and to ascribe a theme to the assembled objects. We were guided in techniques for weaving our elements together; with string and wire, with shared stories and recollections, and with sacred intention.
I had picked four brooches which I wanted to embed in my talisman; one from each of four related women: My German grandmother, my mother, myself, and Yaramin, my daughter.
There were Yaramin’s baby teeth I’d saved, a lock of my white-blonde baby hair…what was my convening theme?
“It’s a matrilineal talisman”, offered Yaramin. Bingo. My soul-wise daughter found for me my rationale. (This Virgo loves a rationale.)
I love retrofitting a meaning after the fact; discovering the thread between seemingly disparate elements that I want to bring together.
It wasn’t until well into the process of making my matrilineal talisman that I found myself engaging, for the first time in my life, with the concept of belonging to a lineage of women. The sense of connection between those that lived before me, my daughter, and those daughters still perhaps to be born, sits sacred and deep in my belly. This is the deeper layer of meaning that opened for me as I worked with my materials. My gathered ephemera had evolved into symbols; each one imbued with the spirit of the woman that had held it.
Here are the brooches, pinned on a ladder of Japanese tea twigs, copper wire and a scattering of tiny pearls left over from my wedding dress.
The butterfly belonged to my mother. She and I had a life-long difficult relationship. Her death brought me relief, and because of that, a deep sadness and guilt.
But look at the butterfly. She loved butterflies; and had amassed butterfly brooches. She’d never worn them; only stowed them. Perhaps they were her talismans; objects of delicate beauty, representing a freedom that she would never experience in her life. I chose this one from amongst her collection because of the delicately wrought silver – like gossamer. My mother was a stoic, solid, stubborn Germanic woman; the opposite of gossamer. And yet…here she is, floating in my talisman with filigree wings.
This butterfly represents for me all the choices that she was never given, and the freedom that didn’t come for her until death. I can’t tell her, now, that it was her mothering, after all, that helped me to find so many of the freedoms that I’ve claimed in my own life.
And here is her mother, my German grandmother; a young woman of sixteen in this photo. This was her brooch. Her steady gaze looks out to a life yet unlived – a life that was to be scarred with hardship and trauma. The horror of American bombing and subsequent occupation of her Bavarian town, her life with an abusive and alcoholic husband, and the death of two of her five children cemented her life into a joyless drudgery. She became obsessively religious, which helped her to reconcile her entrapment. If it wasn’t “God’s will”, then it was punishment for her sins; either way, her faith bought purpose to her austerity.
I’ve been given a life of rich and diverse pathways; a life that has evolved through my matriarchs, and because of them. My talisman is an altar upon which I honour my Oma’s life with gratitude.
Here is my brooch. Unicorns were my totem through my twenties and thirties; a symbol of purity of intent.Yaramin’s bedroom wall has now claimed the collection of unicorn prints and drawings from my Unicorn Years.
Yaramin’s beautiful seahorse: a gift from Julie, her (fairy) godmother, on the day she was born. ‘Yaramin’ is a word from the Wik language of North Queensland; it means ‘seahorse’.
I had found a folded napkin tucked among my mother’s things after she died, with the words written in pencil, “Lindy’s hair, five years old”. It took me a couple of weeks to figure out how to incorporate the hair into my talisman. I imagined the soft strands lining a nest, and there it was. I made this nest from angophora twigs.
This other nest is made with rusty wire, and is lined with Yaramin’s hair. What is it with me and nests? I haven’t got to the bottom of that yet.
The cotton shreds streaming from below the talisman remind me of a leafy sea dragon’s tail. They’re torn from Yaramin’s old muslin nappies, and from my hippie-days’ (Unicorn Years) sarongs. They bring movement and play.
And finally, the gumnuts suspended from hemp twine: each one holds a Yaramin baby tooth. Her milk teeth had been stowed in my jewellery box for years; I’d considered consigning them to the compost many-a-time. But they’re angelic; tiny sentinels of her formative years. Now they’ve been reassigned from ‘clutter’ to ‘matrilineal purpose’. (See what I mean about retrofitting meaning?)
Building this talisman was a slow and considered process, and a revelatory one. It gently expanded the edges of my singular existence on this earth to include a beautiful, elegant, linear sense of my life – forward in time, and back. I’m an awakening participant in the matrilineal wave that carried my grandmother, my mother, myself, and Yaramin, into Life. I will still be a part of the creation pulse that births and renews Life, long after I am gone.
Thank you, Shona Wilson, “Collaborations With Nature”, for your mentorship, invitation, and patience, for sharing your vision, your skills, and deep love of the natural world. And for that beautiful and constant reminder, “Let the materials guide you”.
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