Picture Jasper
Eco Sterling Silver Necklace
 
The Long Valley is named after a John Steinbeck book of the same name. A collection of short stories all set in California. Stories which summon images of rolling dry landscapes, ranches and a distant mountainous haze.
 
Steinbeck was my favourite author growing up. His books captured the raw humanity that can be found in hard times. He describes the way that desperation can often polarise us into the sacred and the profane and captures the mythic dance between good and evil.
 
The landscapes of California themselves hold a mythic place in my imagination. Although containing a history of bloodshed, they seem to have been the embodiment of freedom for people throughout history, the promise of brighter and freer futures.
 
The vastness itself reminds us of our cosmic place. The unrelenting and eternal nature of the cosmos caught in a landscape. These places can be harsh and unforgiving. They show us nature in all its polarities, but they also remind us of the overwhelming awe and connection to our earth that can be found in the distant haze of a mountainous sunset. 
 
They remind us of what we were before domesticity, agriculture and civilisation, the rumbling animal instinct that lives a little closer to the surface than we sometimes imagine.
 
Most of all though what Steinbeck captures in his description of these places is the connection between the land and the people that inhabit it, never more so than in his book ‘To a God Unknown’ which describes the spiritual unity between a man and the land he loves.
 
In his books, we come to understand the deep love that Steinbeck himself had for the land in which he lived and how it fed into the mythic and spiritual view he had of human existence. One which recognised and confronted darkness but was always there to witness and document the human capacity to make beauty from hardship.