Sean's Journal, Part Five: Blessings in the Market

Most folk art is about luck in the old sense of the word, a world of fates to be cajoled or conjoined. Almost all of our old, vintage amber is a visible ritual of blessing. Almost all of the new amber that we are drawn to or design blesses as well. I found a triangular piece of opaque yellow amber in the market place after Midsummer that was so old that its outside was oxidized blood red. Ages ago when the world was a world of song it had been shaped into the Baltic Triangle of the World Mountain, The Mark of Mara the Earth Mother. It is the representation of our life under the Sun, one’s youth, one’s prime and one’s descent to death and burial with The Whole of the People Who Have Come Before. This small, red Bronze Age piece must have been turned up by a plowshare or washed back in from the sea from that time of dreams.

The holy piece had been pinned a hundred years ago when Latvia was just beginning to rise. Later, it had been strung as jewelry by an invalid in the Folk Arts Guild under Soviet oppression.

I was astonished to find such a thing in the market place. The little amber triangle was magic when magic was central to a people… when magic was the acknowledgement of suffering and a form of prayer for “more,” when prayer as it is known today was still thousands of years away from coming to our world.

The pendant’s seller was a middle aged woman who sold things for the invalids. We gave her as much as we had. More than she or we could initially imagine. I put it on and have not taken it off.

It was later on, while I was talking to Ingrida to take a break from the wonder of the red amber that I saw the gentle weaver’s charms made by an invalid as well. They were a macramé of string made by a grandmother using a women’s weaving method so old and so thoughtful that we sometimes forget that their forms were born of great power and passed down as a heritage through family. Here was The Female Open, The Female Closed, and The Female Pregnant with the Light of the Sun and the Bursting of Waters.


We live in a different world now. I don’t know if it is better. At my age I try not to judge things. Rather I think that it is Ingrida’s and my place to live between the two worlds, the now and the world of the past, and act as a bridge so that these worlds might touch together in a fruitful sense and the best that is in us, as a species, be remembered and so, continue. To this end we each have given a life time.

Imagine then my joy in a day which had already been blessed to find that another grandmother, unknown and unasked for, had drawn with white chalk, a blessing over our threshold, over the dark painted door of our Riga apartment, made in the eighteen eighties that Ingrida and I constantly pass through in the bridge of our worlds. There on the lintel she had printed the anagram of the Holy Family and the Three Magi and linked it to our apartment. What could have moved her to do so but love? What emotion other than that could have overwhelmed me as I took the amuletic weaver’s charm’s in my hands and thought of the life that made them; the hands, the soul, and the memory that moved her to create?

We live in a world that is better for any blessing. That the holy can reach out and touch us is thing beyond measure, singular and critically important. Yet it happens, again and again, in the little moments, in the common day… when the soul has been granted time to see.