Hocking the goods

I uncomfortably placed my pieces upon the black velvet tray and took a deep sigh hoping for the best.  As the jeweler behind the counter of this reputable store, located in a affluent town, inspected the jewels with her magnifying loupe, sizing them up from all angles, I curiously felt a short-lived pang of sentimentality.  I wanted to scoop the items back up and scurry back out to the sidewalk, jewels in tow.  The truth is, I wasn’t really attached to any of it.  In fact, I hadn’t worn any of them for close to a decade.  They weren’t huge notable pieces (the showcase engagement ring had long since been hocked in the early days following my ex-husband’s arrest), but they were placeholders in my memory.  Not all of the memories of my previous marriages were bitter – to the contrary, many were as sparkly and brilliant as the diamonds outlaid before me.  But as my friend Joy and I often joked, these represented my “old life.”  I wasn’t bathing in diamonds in my new one.  That wasn’t the life I had redesigned.  So I had tucked them away in a drawer for years – occasionally coming across them and wondering if I would ever do something with them again.  Can you ever reinvent jewels, or wear them without remembering?  The real question - did I want to?When lost in the bliss of a marriage proposal you can’t possibly fathom that it will land back here at a jewelry counter, selling your pieces for extra money; a mortgage payment, some camp fee for your child.  But they were placeholders for more than memories – they had been occupying energetic space in my home.  In an effort to clear excess physical clutter from my house (and life) I began pulling boxes from both the basement and attic.  These boxes, covered in dust and spider webs, held the contents of the things I “couldn’t live without, ” yet they had remained untouched for years, often moving from one storage facility to the next year after year, move after move.  It was time for a shift and part of this shift was to remove this energy from my home.  Why was I holding onto it all?  Who was I kidding, I wasn’t going to wear any of these clothes, my house was no longer decorated in the style of French provincial - these boxes were like energy blocks of the past, clogging the path.  They had to go.“The diamonds in this platinum band setting are smaller than they seem; the setting is deceiving making them look larger than they really are,” said the jeweler.  I laughed and sarcastically remarked, “Well, that’s a great metaphor for my marriage.”  As I stood beside my childhood friend we chuckled (God knows we had been through a lot together).  As we left the jewels to be appraised, my knee-jerk attachment to the pieces disappeared.  The jeweler was going to get back to me with her best offer after an appraisal was done.  By the time we had gotten to the car, I was dreaming of the check.  “I think you are going to do well,” my friend said.  I shrugged my shoulders and said, “I don’t know, but I began to dream.  Maybe it will be enough to build my new website,” I blurted out.   I put it out into the Universe.  That was my wish.Now that would be the ultimate full-circle metaphor.  If I could use the jewels of my past - the past that had caused me so much grief and personal pain – I could turn these placeholders into something far more valuable, something I couldn’t put a price on.  This was my ticket to manifesting my reinvention.  And the most beautiful part, I could look back and thank them all for being a part of the ride.