Thailand in blue and green

a meditation on jade from a land with no past or future tense

My sister in law with my brother, Koh Chang

Not long before my trip to Thailand, I began thinking about jade. Or rather, it occurred to me that I would like to have some. Jade is special because it is marvelously translucent, and often green. There is a paradox in a translucent, green stone. Stone suggests permanency. Solid, implying the eternal in that it resists transformation in time, rock is the first monument that speaks through the ages. This is all relative, of course, since rock is shaped by water just as much as water is contained by rock, but for early peoples, and for all of us, stone suggest strength and lasting power.

Green, on the other hand, is the color of life. Temporary, verdant-green denotes growth; spring time and seasons. It is the passage of time, life too short, ethereal. Transparent green doubles up on the symbolism. So frail, it could vanish at anytime. Life gone, life beautiful, life in all its tender hunger for the light.

Now combine the two, and you can sense the mystery of jade. That which is eternal and yet simultaneously frail and subject to the forces of time. The glaze, celadon, was developed to imitate jade. Guarded as a family secret, the recipe passed through generations-it was a glaze that could ensure a family’s wealth. Celadon, like jade, captures the light at several levels, both internally and reflectively to produce a surface with such depth that it barely seems like a mere surface at all; transforming clay into a translucent, delicate substance.

Orawan’s high quality jade

One of my problems in my search for jade is my big hands. As a Westerner, my hands are larger than the hands of the South East Asian women, and at 5’ 8” I am large even for a Western woman. My hands have been good for pottery, for doing things, for building tables or making frames. They have never been occasions of adornment. Nevertheless, I had my quest. In love with celadon, in love with jade; in love with the slightly blue-green translucency of life rendered eternal, I sought the wondrous stone.

I learned that there are many qualities of jade, the jade from China being the most expensive. I bought jade from Myanmar, much less expensive, but often just as beautiful. (My bracelet from Myanmar cost under $25 while the gorgeous Chinese jade bracelet I didn’t buy was close to $400). I even bought several rings for shy of $3 each that Orawan told me had been treated with a dye. I didn’t mind, they were lovely.

Another paradox at the heart of my love of jade is the way it reflects the mystery of form and formlessness. If you notice, the jade on Orawan’s wrist almost looks like water. If it were not so perfectly formed, you might think it was a bit of ocean that had splashed against her. There is an impossible depth to the color, a depth that belies the slight width of the stone.

My painting, too, is a dance with form and the dissolution of form. I find it distasteful to affirm the mere form of a being, and I don’t let the form stand unaltered when I paint. (I am reminded of Bob Dylan’s line in It’ Ain’t Me Babe-a lover for your life and nothing more. I heard the line as a young teen, and knew immediately that it spoke a truth to me). While objects do seem to have a kind of reality, you need a chair to sit on, when it comes to consciousness, the inside-of-it-ness of a form of seeing is both opportunity and limit. I can’t love in that way; I can’t love the limit. Or rather, what I love is leaping, wings spread on wind and happenstance. What I love is the endless appearing and changing-not entering into a little capsule and making a world of it. Can you catch hold of that which takes form? Can you notice the form as the occasion of experience rather than as a firmament of permanency-even your own? Every form that is entered, incarnated, offers perspective, a beauty, a life. But staying there, as wonderful as it may be, slowly encases you.

Perhaps this may be why I have developed a particular affinity to butterflies. They amaze me; the flutterby’s that alight on flowers and milkweed. A whisper crossing oceans, a baby’s breath that moves through heavens-one with the wind, one with spaciousness…

I may need a bracelet of water to anchor me lest I drift off into infinity.

My bracelet is cloud white. I am still searching for a blue-green one. For now I will let the translucent band keep me from drifting too far into the nether regions of non-duality for fear I might never return.