A friend asked me the other day why I don’t use the word ‘spiritual’ in the branding of my jewellery and it got me thinking about my aversion to the word. Anyone who reads my pieces on here will know that my jewellery is deeply influenced by spiritual ideas and philosophies, especially those of Buddhism and Taoism.
I also believe in God. It may not be the same God espoused by the figureheads of mainstream religion. My conception is something more like a universal wholeness that lies at the base of reality; a force that despite the darkness, heaviness and traumatic nature of the historical moment or our personal lives, is nonetheless directing us towards unity and goodness.
And yet so much of what passes as spirituality strikes me as empty or downright harmful. In the West, like so many aspects of our culture, our ideas tend to reside in the polarities. We are offered a fundamentalist version of Christianity, an overly individualistic form of the ‘New Age’ or a nihilistic, particularly judgmental form of Atheism.
Being raised non-religious, I read various scriptures in my twenties, in an attempt to understand the way I experienced the world. I found some beautiful descriptions of the ineffable, profound and meaningful myths, all mixed in with some of the prejudices that were present in the culture at the time of writing. I could sense that all these texts were pointing to an experience, but that the ideology of modern religion wasn’t the experience itself. In fact, I often found something closer to the mystical in the words of the poets or in the timbre of the human voice in song.
I am a ‘spiritual’ person, in fact I would go so far as to use the much taboo word ‘religious’. Many of my friends and family are not and probably equate my religious thinking with madness, maybe they’re right! However, all we can do is recount our experience of reality in the most truthful and authentic way possible.
The commodification of ‘spirituality’ leaves me uneasy. So much of what we are offered in the spiritual, self-help or therapeutic space has a sales aspect. There are too many celebrity gurus making inordinate amounts of money from offering us vague one-size-fits-all answers or ‘healing’. I want to position myself as far away from that as possible, whilst still sharing honestly about what inspires me.
For me, there is a spiritual component to existence but often it is deeply personal and experiential and not something that can necessarily be explained rationally. Nonetheless, it guides us. It is often not grand or opulent but is instead there as a ‘still small voice’ in our darkest moments. That is what I hold onto amidst the noise and it is that that hopefully shines through in every one of my creations.
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