Never An Exact Copy

When I first started designing the piece, I was certain it looked and felt like a Gemini. Then I stat with it for a while and said the name out loud a few times, and something about it began to fall flat. That tends to happen with names. And so began the process of collecting every name I genuinely thought might fit.

What do these earrings evoke? What does that translate to?

Botanical names. Names that sounded like a halo bursting open. Sanskrit ones. Words for flowers and stars in different languages. Words I thought Inara clients and friends would love. I filled pages, mental and literal. Some of them were beautiful and rolled right of my tongue. None of them felt right.

While I searched, the earrings themselves were nearing completion. I could the colors and form finally take shape and something in me began to suspect the name had never been the problem at all.

Still, I kept looking, because a part of me felt that Gemini was too literal of a translation. A matched pair. Identical? An astrological sign? Pleasant, sure. Decorative, absolutely! A little gimmicky. It felt like the sort of thing you might find in the back pages of a magazine or match your astrological sign with the style of the month. Not the sort of thing you reach for when you are building a high jewellery piece.

And this is coming from someone who reveres astrology. I know its significance, and the spiritual symbolism it has carried through my life and the way I connected with my own sign, Scorpio. That is exactly what left me split. An astrological name felt costume to me, for something I take quite seriously. So I carried on searching for a different name, when what I should have been doing was looking harder at the one I already had.

After what felt like a couple of months, I decided to take a break. I laid the piece out in front of me: the final earrings, the original sketch, the wax and the gemstones I did not choose. Going through it all, it still felt like a Gemini. It did look like twins, but most pairs of earrings do, of course. This felt different.

So I stopped looking outward. Perhaps the way forward to dig deeper into the meaning of twins, into the siginicance of Gemini and into why as humans we love the idea of a matching pair. I also had to have several conversations with myself.

No two earrings I make will ever be the same. A pair can share form, but at Inara, no two gemstones ever will. They are not meant to be an exact same. They may carry the same properties, emit similar energies, come from the same ground and still the light each one holds will always be different. That is the beauty of natural gemstones. They can look and feel the same AND never be an exact copy of one another.

The a Greek story I came across intrigued me. Castor and Pollux, two brother, one born immortal and the other mortal. When Castor died, Pollux surrendered half of his own immortality rather than be parted from him. The two were ser in the sky together. Those stars were never exactly the same. What made them a constellation was they came together to become one.

In my owngoing interest in Vedic readings, I learned that the Sanskrit name for Gemini is Mithuna. It means union, a pair that comes together. Mithuna is depicted as two individuals, each representing something different, each completing the other. I also learned that Mithuna is ruled by Buddha, the planet mercury which governs speech and intelligence and exchange. Everything that happens between two things.

It was never about sameness. It is about what two natures make possible when they are held in the same frame, without having to give way to the other.

I finally reached a place where I could trust my instinct. Gemini. I understood why it came to me in the first place. Teal and Pink Sapphires carry entirely different temperments, one cool and the other warm. Yet when they are set close to each other, the piece reads as a single note.

I chose the gemstones and the color palette long before I understand the name. This is why naming a piece at Inara carries weight. Every piece, including this one carries meaning, carries forward a philosophy that means something to our brand and values.

That is why this piece stayed with me. We are constantly taught as women, sometimes its subtle and occasionally its with boiling rage, that a woman holding two natures is a contradiction to be resolved. She cannot be a working woman and the who takes care of the home. She cant possibly do everything at once. That choosing one over the other is the only way forward.

Castor and Pollux say otherwise, Mithuna says otherwise. So do gemstones. Two different things, standing together, neither one diminished or suppressed by the presence of the other. The dreamer and the doer. The softhearted and the sure. They can operate on the same plain.

That is completeness.

Find Gemini Earrings here, along with all our other designs.