I sought Common Era several years ago because I saw, fixed within an Instagram ad, the beauty and gravity of an ephemeral dream, familiar but strange like an ancestral memory, caught and pressed into molten gold like a seal of wax. Like most of us I glaze over or scroll right by those sorts of ads. None had ever truly struck me. Not like this. Artemis in blazing gold gazed boldly from the center of a blazing sun. Like a huntress inducted, I was caught up in that gaze.
Like many a nymph and maiden and muse before me, I had never been very interested in familiar paths. There are some things in this world I can be satisfied by, and for all the rest I must adopt an attitude of amor fati. It is what it is, I am what I am, and the escape is not through or beyond, but within that which is necessary.
In this, at least, I thought if I’m to be a starving artist, I must throw myself into work that makes my heart pound, to honor these faces that hold the promise of knowledge and understanding, thousands of years before and after myself. My words must be sharper. The depths of my knowledge must grow deeper. I must seek to understand the truth I wish to share, and revel in it all.
These lofty goals began with a conversation with Torie Tilley, the Founder + CEO + now one of my dearly cherished friends. As I carved out this journal with thoughts on classics and literature and art and gold, she became a constant source of inspiration, always working six or twelve or eighteen months ahead, full of grace and unfailing, intuitive vision in times of metamorphic uncertainty, wielding sorrow like a torch.
When Torie shared the dream of the Molten collection with me, my heart began to beat in that familiar way. When I first saw Artemis, I and many, many other young women were able to see the dream caught in the hands of a creator and preserved in liquid gold, reflected in ourselves. And those who saw it once see it again now, the true nature of the thrumming heart of Common Era.
I am no longer starving, but hungry. I strive to love my fate and thrill in the desire of the chase. All this which is intangible has been, by some force beyond me, pressed in molten gold.
Meet with me here, in this crossroads of memory and desire and promise, as the delicate chain glitters from your collarbones, drawing the eye down your neck, to where the sun is caught in the face of the goddess burning over your heart.
