Wisps and Hints

What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?

I asked Naomi Shihab Nye, a highly honored, award winning poet, to tell me about what it is like having people find her words on our jewelry. I also wanted to know about her creative process and here is what she had to say:

Jeanine Payer's jewelry reminds me of precious perfectly-weighted nuggets of beauty -- the sort we dreamed of as kids, filling our pockets with shiny stones that felt yummy in our hands. Having lines from my poems inscribed on Jeanine's bracelets, necklaces, and one ring (my traveling companion!) is an amazing blessing. A poem is a nugget. A line of a poem is a tinier incremental nugget. Nuggets finding friends. I prefer publishing on Jeanine's astonishing jewelry to publishing in BOOKS.

My creative process is very simple. I write often, in a notebook, with a pencil or a pen, and I go back to it. Hospitality to the images and snippets which drift through all our minds, an attention to signs of all kinds, an affection for bits and pieces, scraps and "wisps" or "hints" -- as William Stafford called them -- this is how everything begins.

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

--Naomi Shihab-Nye