This is an interesting question to be faced with today – while on the surface it obviously can be met with literality, as a writing prompt, it naturally asks more of us to sit down and reflect to write more. Or at least that’s how it reads to me.
My answer is twofold: the oldest thing I’m physically wearing is a pentacle. Previously exclusively my mother’s, now recently bestowed upon me to wear for a time. At least until it’s either recalled to her or something else comes to find me.
This one in particular is made out of thin silver, with a rainbow moonstone gem in the middle, wrapped by an intentionally off-colour tarnished snake. It’s a piece that I picked up for her around a decade ago when travelling in Salem, Massachusetts.
We used to live in MA during my early high school years, following behind my mother who was studying her PhD at university in the early 2000s. The memories made there are important stitches in my life’s tapestry. When not walking the halls of the Waltham Hawks though, my mother and I would often find ourselves up along the coast, about 30 minutes drive when traffic was good, walking through old cemeteries and archive buildings in the greater Salem area. While at the time I didn’t yet understand the value of those days, jokingly calling it child abuse to be dragged through graveyards on the regular –I now know it for the important work she was doing, shining truth on the history of the real people who lived through the infamous Salem witch trials.
I had grown up in a pagan household; while the rest of my family would consider themselves Lutheran, my mother was a practising witch herself and I spent many of my youngest days in the midst of a supportive coven. She herself also was an initiated Voodoo priestess (from before I was born), and a student of the craft both in spirit and in its history. I grew up surrounded by magic.
During those times, when not traipsing through graveyards, we often visited Salem proper and drank in all the pagan shops (tourist and traditional alike), savouring quality seafood, and being frequent riders of the Salem Trolley Tour. She made good friends with many of the practitioner-owners of the area, including the one that would a decade later, sell me the pentacle I’m wearing today (alongside the best ritually made incense I’ve smelled since childhood).
Around 2012 – 2014, was the aforementioned trip that my friend and I ended up back in Salem, MA after a trip to Washington D.C. and New York City. Prior to our arrival in Salem, but after our departure, my mother told me about a dream she had – describing this pendant. She had been scrolling through the website for Nu Aeon to give us a list to pick up for her — and there it was, this very one. It was a shock, but one very much in line with the kind of synchronous magic I’d learned about the world, tangible but miraculous in its own right.
She called the owner and after reminiscing discovered that the pentacle had been in storage for a long time. Prior to its inclusion on the website (long after we’d stopped living in the area and moved home to Canada), there would have been no chance that my mother would have ever seen it physically before. And yet, she saw it in her dream almost exactly as it was found in the tucked away boxes of that shop.
It was agreed that the following day I would pick up the necklace for her when we came to Salem, along with several other choice selections. And so so much incense – a handful of packages we still have with us over a decade later. She opened her doors for us on a day that Nu Aeon would have not otherwise been open – feeling too the call of the dream’s synchronicity.
I was given this pentacle after having my own dream about one. Despite growing up immersed in pagan life and largely participating in it as naturally as others attend mass, I’ve only recently started to embrace it more openly, rather than the quiet reverence I kept to myself and my ancestors. While the pentacle held in my dream is not the one I carry around my neck, it has its own story and significance. A story I add to every day its with me. I don’t know when the one that reached out through the dreamscape will reach me, but I’m grateful for the presence of this one while I keep watch.
When starting to answer this question I knew I felt a call to address not only the age of what I’m physically wearing, but also the stories I carry with me. The invisible tapestry stitched thread by thread by all my life’s experiences. While the oldest adornment I have on me today is this pentacle and its story – I also wear my tapestry. At least as old as the idea of me held in the heart of my mother before I was born, and everything that’s been stitched in since. Memories that echo in steps moving forward, in reflections of the past in objects that linger in our view; of a voice reaching from the position of everything that’s come before, beckoning the future to meet it in the brief space of present reality.
Some people may feel burdened by their tapestry, but I wear it proudly like a cloak. The gentle weight of a life lived, uniquely mine, growing more majestic and beautiful with each passing year. Some spots are worn, others were broken but mended — and I’m grateful for every stitch.
Then COVID struck. Slowly, then encapsulating the world. With the physical spaces we used to gather no longer being accessible, people fled to the internet to try and make whole the social spaces they were deprived of. The very people who claimed that these spaces were the death of all community are now struggling to try to figure out how to use the internet as the vast saviour of all things social.
My Life, or Something Like It 