September: The Season of Grace
September has always felt a little personal to me. It is my birth month, Libra is my birth sign, and perhaps that explains my lifelong attraction to beauty, balance, and the art of making things feel just so.
Or perhaps I simply like September and the promise of coats, jackets and scarves.
Even here in Tucson, where the boots may remain optimistic for a while longer, there is a sense that something is shifting.
At the center of the month is the Fall Equinox, that remarkable moment when day and night meet as near equals. I love the symbolism of it, but this year I am less interested in perfect balance than in what balance makes possible.
Space
Space to think. Space to make. Space to do (and gosh, am I DOING!) Space to notice what has been crowded out by the pace of our lives.
THE SEASON OF GRACE TRINITY
Rose Quartz • Mother of Pearl • Azurite
These pigments tell a story of compassion, grace, and vision - not a bad formula for my precious September.
ROSE QUARTZ
| The Compassionate |
Rose Quartz is an old friend in my studio and in fact, has become my signature paint in many ways.
Scientifically, it is a variety of quartz, silicon dioxide, with a Mohs hardness of 7 (that's getting pretty hard). Its soft pink color is not simply “pink quartz.” The familiar pick cloud of Rose Quartz owes its color to microscopic aligned silicate fibers within the stone. Those tiny inclusions create the hazy translucence that makes Rose Quartz feel so soft and diffused in the hand. Funny how something so hard looks so gentle and pretty.
The love of rose quartz is almost as timeless as the stone itself. Rose Quartz beads dating to around 7000 BC have been found in the region of ancient Mesopotamia. Assyrians used Rose Quartz in jewelry, while Roman, Egyptian, and Greek cultures attached symbolic and protective meanings to quartz. Over time, Rose Quartz became closely associated with love, affection, and emotional balance.
In the BlueSoul archetypes, Rose Quartz is The Compassionate.
I think of compassion as something more interesting than simply being nice.
I think it has more to do with the willingness to stay open, to ourselves, and with one another.
(and to the work when it isn't going particularly well ;)
Element: Water
Chakra: Heart
Creative Gift: Lead with compassion. Rose Quartz asks us to let the heart have a voice.
MOTHER OF PEARL
| The Muse of Grace |
Mother of Pearl is not a crystal at all.
It is nacre, a remarkable material created by mollusks through biomineralization, where biology and mineralogy quite literally meet.
Under magnification, Mother of Pearl is built from tightly packed platelets of aragonite, a crystalline form of calcium carbonate, held together by thin layers of organic material. That layered structure is one of the reasons nacre can shimmer and shift as the light moves across it. Its iridescence is not painted onto the surface. It is built into the architecture of the material itself.
I love this - nature is creating luminosity through layering.
Mother of Pearl has been used for centuries in jewelry, decorative arts, sacred objects, inlay, and ornament. It has appeared across cultures because it catches light in a way few natural materials can. It is captivating and subtle.
In my own watercolor paints, that quality matters because Mother of Pearl does not behave like an opaque white. It's super subtle, catching the light and projecting a luminosity that lifts every other color around it, and leaves a whisper of light behind. I see it in my mother's pearls that I wear proudly now, and in the paint I make.
It is particularly beautiful to me as a metaphor for grace.
Grace is rarely one dramatic act.
It develops through experience and the layers of our life. Mother of Pearl helps show us when to hold on and when to soften.
Element: Water
Chakra: Crown
Creative Gift: Create spaciousness
Its invitation is simple: Beauty does not have to demand attention to be seen.
AZURITE
| The Visionary |
And then there is Azurite ( My prize!!!! Do I ever feel like a pigment hunter now!)
Azurite is one of the newest pigments to enter my studio, and I admit I have been saving it.
If ever there were a month to bring it forward, my birth month seemed like a very good excuse.
Azurite is a copper carbonate hydroxide mineral that forms most often in the oxidized zones of copper deposits, alongside Malachite, and has a Mohs hardness of about 3.5 to 4 (think soft-ish).
It can range from light azure blue to an extraordinarily deep, saturated blue. Azurite is found around the world, including historic European mining regions, North Africa, Australia, and the American Southwest. Home, here in Arizona, we have notable Azurite localities, including Bisbee and Copper Basin.
That Arizona connection makes this pigment even more irresistible to me because it truly is home base.
Azurite's artistic history is where the story really holds resonance for me. Long before synthetic blues were available, artists had to build their palettes from the natural world. Blue was especially precious.
Azurite was crushed, washed, sorted by particle size, and turned into pigment for painting. The resulting color could shift depending on how finely it was ground. Coarser material often produced a deeper blue, while finer grinding could make the color paler.
Azurite became an important blue in European medieval and Renaissance painting, especially in devotional works, altarpieces, robes, architecture, and skies. It was often used where artists needed a rich mineral blue but did not have access to the much more expensive ultramarine derived from lapis lazuli.
In sacred painting, this meant Azurite quite literally helped create heavens, garments, distance, and the visual language of the divine.
There is something almost impossible about that idea, actually. A copper mineral pulled from the Earth becomes sky. There is something so poetic about this.
Across Asia, artists also developed sophisticated traditions of working with mineral and gemstone pigments, particularly in manuscript and miniature painting. In Indian painting traditions, minerals and other natural colorants were painstakingly prepared, ground, washed, and layered to produce luminous surfaces and extraordinary depth.
What moves me is not the claim that my process is new. It is, in fact, quite the opposite.
I am carrying forward a very old artistic conversation.
A tradition in which artists looked around at their feet and asked: "What rock can become paint?"
What else can this stone become? That is why Azurite is The Visionary.
Element: Air
Chakra: Third Eye
Creative Gift: Expand your vision. Azurite asks us to look beyond what is immediately visible and trust the larger vision beginning to take shape.
WHY THIS TRINITY?
Rose Quartz opens the heart. Mother of Pearl makes room. Azurite looks toward possibility.
Together they feel like September to me.
September Vibes: Think a moment of balance
The Equinox arrives on September 22, bringing us that brief and beautiful threshold between seasons. Virgo's attention to refinement gives way to Libra's invitation toward relationship, harmony, and balance.
But perhaps balance is not really the destination. Perhaps balance simply gives us enough room to hear ourselves again, enough room to notice beauty, make something, to change our minds or to become curious about what might happen next.
That is the kind of balance I am interested in this September.
Just a little more space. A little more grace.
And one extraordinary blue stone pigment waiting in my studio, inviting in wonder.
September reminds us that when we make space to create, beauty and grace have room to emerge.
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