Mana Flower Ring

What It Is: a cheap adjustable ring with a blue glass flower

Where It Came From: Pier 1 Imports

What It Means:
I'm going to veer off wildly once or twice here, but it does come back to the ring, I promise.

Awhile back I mentioned Morning Pages as the most basic exercise in "The Artist's Way," well, the fact is that I have a much easier time with them than I do with the second most basic exercise, the Artist Date.  The idea of that one is just to take an hour a week and go and do something fun and spiritually/intellectually/creatively nourishing all by yourself and just for yourself.  It's trickier if you live in podunk, and much trickier if you have assertiveness issues, such that I will go without doing it for weeks or months at a time, even though I know it is very helpful when I do get to doing it, and it doesn't have to be something huge.  One of the better Artist Dates I've ever done was going to a furniture store and just trying things out with no intention to buy; I got to try a massage chair, it firmed up a scene in a story I was working on, it was lovely.

One fairly lackluster Artist Date I took, though, was to the nearest Pier 1 Imports store, just because I hadn't been in one for years.  It was very pretty on the inside, granted, but the stuff didn't make any big impression, it was just useless decoration and thus, for me, uninteresting.

However, as I came to the checkout there was a bowl of cheap rings, and I wanted this one.  Despite the obvious cheapness, I thought and still do think that it's beautiful.  That vivid-yet-deep, slightly-warm blue has been my favorite color ever since I was a child (I have never forgiven the Crayola company for discontinuing Green Blue), which was probably why...

I was in High School when Secret of Mana (aka Seiken Densetsu 2) came out for the Super NES, and in the history of my fandom obsessions, it might be the first one in "recorded history" --- not that it was a huge break from anything I was doing before, but if I trace the sequence back, before SoM things start to get fuzzy.  I tried to go back and play it lately and was rather humbled by the ponderous special-move-charging system and loose controls, but back in the day it was a thing of incredible beauty, and hearing it start up is still very evocative for me.  I don't have any of the old sketchbooks handy from that time, but I did lots of fan-art for it, and in said fan-art, I decided that the Mana Tree had flowers --- flowers that were my favorite shade of blue, and had kind of a water-lily shape...

So yeah, I had to get the ring.  I got it recently, but it echoed something way back.

Where It's Going: Nowhere; I never have gotten around to wearing it, but I keep it on my desk.