Making Meditation: A Gilded Age

On gold and birthdays and the weird gift of existence

Today marks forty years that I’ve spent wandering around this strange and glorious sphere hurtling through space. I mean, I wobbled around for the first year or two, but I’ve more or less got the hang of it now.

These days, when the wobbles come, they tend to be of a more psychospiritual variety. I have, in fact, been taking stock of my emotional balance more often lately, afraid that some seismic event might shudder my foundations upon arriving at this new decade. I’m pretty sure the call is coming from outside the house, though, and that these worries are not actually mine.

You know the drill: hauling around the culturally imposed notion of a woman’s increasing irrelevance as she ages, especially those of us without children, *insert the sound of Charlie Brown’s teacher speaking here*. I frankly find it unbearably dull, but we all have low moments when the malicious voices in our heads can turn the most mundane tools into lethal weapons; the game of Clue includes a wrench and a lead pipe, remember?

So I’ve been doing what I always do to get a jump on the voices: making things. I don’t hold with the Protestant practice of shaming rest nor do I believe that “idle hands are the Devil’s workshop,” but I WILL attest that you can outrun the bastard pretty well with a skein of yarn or a head of cabbage. And since I anticipated the demon horde to show up in force for my birthday blowout, I brought out the good stuff: gold. Well, gold leaf, to be more precise.

A couple I’m friends with celebrated their 50^th wedding anniversary this July. These humans truly adore one another and are absolute rocks in the community, but they’re also hippies who don’t go in for many possessions and have already probably started Swedish death cleaning their home, so I had to get creative.

We all traveled to Ireland together, and I have a vivid memory of them standing in front of the hulking trunk of an ancient oak burned into my brain as some kind of Ur image of them now. Since 50 years is the “golden” anniversary, I decided to gild a Celtic dara (oak) knot on a stone I had brought home from Ireland.

Even such a small piece is fastidious work, so I waded into a 48-part lecture series called “How the Earth Works” – you know, as one will do. When I visited the Grand Canyon earlier this year, I realized how little I understand about the geology of this planet and how hard it is for my brain to process timescales in billions of years. In one of the first lectures, the professor, Dr. Michael Wysession, referenced John McPhee’s book Basin and Range:

 “Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”

I highly recommend steeping oneself in programming about deep time if at all anxious about an impending birthday. It’s hard to feel like anything but the luckiest mayfly when you grasp, even for a moment, the enormity of time when the opportunity to exist as a human—much less one with a ZIP code and an email address—just….wasn’t. And dear God, the elaborate Rube Goldberg machine of heat and pressure and radiation and churning rock and colliding plates and bacteria and luck and catastrophe required to get us here! We’re really a planet full of lottery winners.

Becoming aware of the infinitesimally rare privilege of existing at all is a heavy gift, though. It’s a fistful of gold I want to spend well. None of us knows how much we’ve got, just that we can’t take it with us. If any anxiety dogs me at the doorstep of 40 it’s this: I thought I’d know by now where I want to allocate it, how I want to spend it. But as the years tick by, instead of knowing my “calling,” I keep seeing more and more bright paths forking out like fans of lightning—or, appropriately, seams of gold. I conceptually understand that I can only travel down one, but there’s also a part of me that thinks that’s a load of hot horse hockey. But I, being the clever little ginger I am, think I’ve found a loophole….

Some interesting facts about gold. It’s a tremendously dense metal - almost twenty times as heavy as water. Because it’s so heavy, a bulk of it has sunk to the earth’s core where there exists enough to plate the surface of the earth 4 meters thick. It’s also from outer space. Precious metals can only be forged in the furnace of a supernova or star collisions and brought to Earth by space dust or asteroid. Your wedding band and gold earrings, the processor in your smartphone and computer, are the gleaming remnant of dead or collided stars that illuminated the void of space in a brilliant explosion.

It’s highly conductive, doesn’t corrode or tarnish, and doesn’t significantly depreciate in value. It is also the most malleable metal; one ounce can be beaten into a sheet 300 square feet in size and between four and five millionths of an inch thick.

The history of gold leaf is fascinating and stretches back at least into ancient Egypt circa 2600 BCE where it was used on sarcophagi. It’s brought its gleaming light to Greek sculptures and Irish illuminated manuscripts, Italian domes and Japanese religious figures. Now a partly mechanized practice, a few craftspeople still beat gold by hand:

For these many reasons, 24k gold leaf is rather expensive, so I save my gilding adventures for special occasions. But let me tell you: I think it’s my drug of choice. The delicate gestures of applying gold leaf and (*quiet gasp*) brushing it gently away revealing the gleaming design is an amazing craft high.

An artist whose work I love, Jackie Morris, regularly gilds labyrinths onto stones before returning them to the sea. I want to do something like that. I want to carry a paintbrush, a weightless packet of gold leaf, and ecologically inert sizing (okay, seriously though, if anyone has a lead on this, please let me know) into the southern Appalachians and leave spirals and arabesques on stones and leaves and trees. One friend joked I’m becoming Midas. To another, I explained that I know the earth has no need for my ornamentation, but that the desire to do it is so strong, I can’t make sense of it.

“It’s a form of prayer,” she said. “Maybe it’s exactly what it needs.”

Credit: Jackie Morris

I have a hunch that this urge goes beyond the simple rush of making shiny marks. These thin sheets of precious metal are my loophole: what if I don’t have to spend the weight of my golden existence in one place? Life, even a good one like mine, swings a heavy hammer. What if I let the blows over the years beat my gold gossamer thin? What if what felt like a heavy weight becomes so dispersed it can ripple in the slightest breeze? What if I transform my palmful of gold into sheets and sheets that can cover everything I see in old starlight?

The only thing I’ve known that has felt like a calling is creating things for people that bring them joy and a sense of belonging. Just making little gifts. “Gift,” Lewis Hyde tells us, “revives the soul.” Recently, I’ve been putting more of my energy into doing this with words. I lack the poetry for the words themselves to be the offering, but I can use them to point to the strange marvels of our existence, to re-enchant people with this home 4.5 billion years in the making.

This year, I will no longer wonder how to spend my gold or let it drag down my pockets. I will no longer strive to be a careful investor but will become a gilder, turning my thinly beaten gold into prayer.