Some buttons jumped out at me from a ratty kind of basket in the secondhand shop on Saturday; rummaging through plastic-pretending-to-be-important and trademarked ugly things, these ivory traditional buttons leapt into my hands... I couldn't believe my luck, as this was not the first basket of packs of buttons I'd rummaged through lately - and I was readying to resign myself to keeping the original 'boring' buttons on my lovely big purple coat.
Buttons like this do not often appear for 2.5o Euros... They are evidently undervalued, but I noticed immediately their depth and meaning, and despite being unable to find anything online to identify them (what a load of shite the internet is now, where any search for any specific item seems to only pull up advertising hooks and mainstream commercial sites repeating images in not-even-superficial-pretence of offering 'choice'! - roll on web3!) I could hazard some guesses as to where they may have originated.
They appear to be actual ivory - whether land or sea mammal I don't know - they contain various marks that suggest indigenous wisdom, sacred geometry and natural law. They evidently are handmade with significant skill. They don0t appear to be conventionally commercial, but they convey (to me) a more deeply-rooted representation of value.
They are in several pairs, which is so beautifully perfect for my coat. The pairs seem more than just matching clothing type of arrangement: they feel almost like runes or divination tools. The holes handcut and the lines engraved, the forms and division of each face into areas - all this suggest symbolic significance and transmission of metaphor, sacred geometry, truth, nature....
Suffice to say, I was blissed-out over them: cleaning and polishing, using a stitch-unpicker to dig out ditritus from inside the holes and markings, scrubbing enthusiastically to remove years of muck... turning them over and over and feeling their weight, reading them and intuiting where they had been over their lifetimes... Listening to their stories.
the above photo and those following, are of removing the old buttons from my purple wool coat and replacing with the new, magical, ones!
It is such a powerful 'inheritance' to receive a gift like this, across seas and continents, across generations and lifepaths: a converging of synchrony, a lining up of serendipity and coincidence - arriving to meet with my call for 'really special buttons please, universe!' When we live in harmony and synthesis, magical items like this can pop into our lives with no effort, and we can just meet them, be super grateful, and then insert them neatly into where they fit so divinely.
These buttons make me think of how the original clothing we dressed in was profoundly more meaningful, special, rich and expressive. All fastenings would have had multiple purpose - NOT JUST to fasten; to fasten beautifully - and to give protection metaphorically and symbolically - magically.
As a carrier of Vision and a conveyor of Truth, I relish gifts like this, which give me the opportunity to use my channelling and radiating capacities - I can re-enliven these small treasures and bring them back into the community, as it were. I can carry them into the day and onto the road, where they will expose their blessings and gifts to whoever I come into contact with.
I imagine too, that no matter how unhelpful t'internet is, the buttons will continue to unveil their stories to me... I already got some clues looking books of my own about indigenous traditional dress and ornament. In a sense, the details of precisely where and when they are from are less important than where they go are be from here...and path
