I grew up on the shores of the Great Lakes on the lower East coast of Michigan and for many years was a Merchant Seaman living aboard ship on the lakes & at sea.  At an early age I found I was aware of slight variations in some physical objects or the space around them, an energetic interaction between different things in the physical world. 

These energies or currents are in constant motion from and between rock outcrops, large old trees, flowing springs, minerals, crystals, and us.  So I watched and learned how the energy of one thing can affect another and the impact of my presence. Over time I discovered that similar currents ran through & over the earth’s surface, it flows with the waters, blows in the wind and rains down from the heavens, stars and planets. 

As I traveled I began to understand a little something of a forgotten science, which the ancients had once mastered. They labored for centuries marking earth ground points with standing stones, stone circles, pyramids and lines of standing stones across the country side the reasons now seems obvious. As a merchant seaman I had the opportunity to travel the world and experience some of these wonders. I met many peoples with different beliefs and traditions who also knew of these currents and we would share our understandings.

In the mid seventies after a few of years sailing the Great Lakes& life on the water I came down to the SW. Desert country on a extended camping and cross country hiking trip for the winter. On my walk about I met a nomadic group of Native peoples in the Desert Mountains of Northern Mexico and was given a deeper understanding of life and a broader view of the world. It was a small group of 25 to 45 people whose numbers would change with the seasons and location with a year round core group of about 25. These were Native American and Mexican peoples of several different tribes and clans. The people I had first met were the ones I ended up staying with who were Mescalaro Apache for the most part.  Over time and with the help and guidance of an elder of this group I was shown some of the old ways, “The Way of Stillness”

 yet I would liken it more to a deep meditative martial art. He showed me many things, the first was that if you can become perfectly still inside you become aware of all things around you seen and unseen. From this still place you can with awareness interact with and change the energy or flavor of your surroundings. The second, was that there are responsibilities that come with that awareness and third, that an articulate quasi-intelligent energy permeates the natural world and to learn of these ways one need only go out into the wild places and ask to be shown.

Now I have read of such things and I’ve been told this by different teachers and masters but this elder was the first to show me and I’ve been apprenticing ever since. The Red Rock cliffs, caves, canyons, forest, rivers and wild life of Sedona are powerful teachers. The Way of Stillness is sensitivity to the currents, cycles and rhythms of the nature world around us. This understanding allows me to create energetic and purposeful amulets in service to others. Esoteric knowledge, harmonies of the heavens and earth linked through sacred geometry and other sacred ways guide my craft and brings many different arts together with purpose, so I create to eco creation in an Amulet.  

As a 21-century amulet maker who works with some of the old ways with modern eyes I begin to see and understand. There is more to our world and us then what is seen, life is but a glimmer of the reality at hand and the world is full of obvious things, which no one by chance ever observes.