Dear Ornament Reader,

While this issue marks another hot, languid season, we are energetic, productive and already looking forward to the informative and stimulating articles that will soon bring us to the year’s end. Those issues will be as beautiful, and to be as treasured, as the one you now hold in your hands. Many, many readers immediately turn to the Postscript from the Editors as the introduction to the latest issue. Your personal journey begins here; then moves to the front of the magazine; going on to our Letters from Our Readers; the Artists and Contributors; and finally the Contents page, where you make your initial selection for the thoughtful reading and pure enjoyment to follow. It is a passage that takes you into aspects of your lives that broaden and deepen them in unsuspected and surprising ways.

We see the world reflected in our pages, the very energy of the magazine drawn from the diverse cultures and peoples who distinguish themselves one from another. While the subject is personal adornment, the larger point we make is the respect and understanding, appreciation and humility we show for others. The time is long past when we can exist isolated from the earth’s community, conceptualizing the world as strangers and foreigners.

Today we recall our long ancient history of personal adornment, here personified by the arts of the Haida, Ovahimba and Yemeni peoples, or from the beads produced all over the world, over time and long distance from our contemporary lives. Collectors like Billy Steinberg or entrepreneurs like Kelley Lades and Peter Wiley of San Francisco Arts and Crafts find great pleasure in beads, delighting in these small wonders of artistic and cultural handicraft. There is a heartfelt passion for the natural world, and it is translated into jewelry by artists like Myles Edgars, Laura McCabe and Leila Tai. They recognize that the time is past when the world can be viewed as forever bountiful. Artists like Jane Adam, Susan Neal, William Richey and Ann Williamson fulfill themselves, not by seeking to line their pockets with gold, but by growing and learning, bringing their personal visions and meanings to the work they create.

Just a few moments ago we paused in our writing to find that one particular quotation, which turns up when needed, ready to inspire our tributes and remembrances. “There are mornings when the sun pours in and the sky is that kind of blue you know you’ve never seen before,” says Corita Kent. “And the quality of the white clouds floating and the geraniums blooming indoors and the floor and carpets and all the colors and shapes are new too. These moments are very intense because you can hardly believe that this beauty exists every day when you are going faster or you have your back turned to it. And it’s these moments that one feels yes, the same blood runs in us all and these things are really me too. All these things are, as Alan Watts said, extensions of myself. And I think how beautiful, how really great I am. I am this tree and I am that flower and I am not separate from them.”

So welcome to another issue, dear reader, and thank you for joining our common journey, helping us to extend ourselves in unsuspected and surprising ways, and reminding us that we are not separate from one another.