I love the caps on acorns, the little stem that goes off to the side....I love all the different colors and the smooth, satiny outsides. I love how they sit side by side or in a pile, all nestled together, caps tucked and pointing right and left. I’ve collected them for 47 years!
When I was 7 to 9 years old I loved acorns because they were part of a cycle of nature that was predictable, all the squirrels scurrying around, cupping these little wonders in their hands and keeping them for when food was scarce. Something about how they could count on acorns gave me hope as I lived in a house that was unpredictable and cruel. I used to look out my window and watch the squirrels and then go out and gather handfuls of little acorns. How big is the job this little wonder has to do, to make a tree...such a sense of purpose and hope!
My most personal connection with the little pretty acorn at this age was that I collected them and stored them in my closet and watched them sprout, making my stepmother very angry. Bags of them all steamy and sprouting green tops like onions. I think I did it out of defiance to the woman who told me over and over again that I was ugly, repulsive, disgusting and that she hated being my mother-- at the very time when a young girl begins to wonder...am I pretty?
At that time, as a developing little girl, I was so confused and I remember sitting and looking in the mirror and wondering...really? Am I really that ugly and disgusting? It haunted me then and 47 years later it still echoes in my heart. I see my own little girls at this stage and think how much different life would have been with someone telling me I was precious and wanted--that I was wonderfully made by a God who delights in me.
How sweet of my Lord Jesus to restore all that is lost...to choose this season of my life to heal this nightmare with the inspiration to do an Acorn Collection and untie the lies that I’ve lived with for a lifetime. It is precious to me that He knows the very details of our lives--that the acorn in all its simple beauty would be used in my jewelry to heal another place in my broken heart.
To celebrate this and to surrender the “collection of acorns” stored in my mind, I am creating silver and gold acorn caps topping beautiful white shell, bone, wood, stone and turquoise beads. They are hanging on chains, leather, hanging with other baby acorns...When I look at them today hanging like pendulums of elegant beauty I feel calm and pretty (sometimes) and victorious over the past, ready to grow...
Pick one out that speaks to you, gather and wear them together, small and large, and remember that beauty is a seed within you, planted by God, never to be erased or confused with anyone else. Tell your little girls how beautiful and wanted they are and you are planting seeds of hope. |
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