Let’s talk Treasure
What is treasure?
Per Webster, treasure is defined thusly:
1) Accumulated wealth in the form of money or jewels etc.
2) To be fond of; be attached to
3) To hold dear
4) A work of art highly prized for its beauty or perfection
5) A collection of precious things
6) Any possession that is highly valued by its owner
Pretty broad spectrum of things to call “treasure”
What is treasure to me, might be junk to you.
Here’s what I call treasure–and the things you will be seeing us hunting for the most.
1) Gold, Silver, Copper, Platinum, Gemstones etc, in free mill form. (i.e something we can pan, mine or pick up off the ground without the aid of acids or other harsh chemical processes.)
2) Historical Artifacts–authentic Native American and Roman are some of my favorites.
3) Pocket watches, Old musical instruments Civil War and other Militaria
4) Jewelry, Coins, Antiques and Oddities! (..a…monkey paw you say?….)
5) Wisdom, Inspiration, and Joy.
Ok, that last one was a little over the top, but still legitimate. The search for treasure more than just the search for shiny rocks, so we can buy tequila and Big Macs.
The searching, the mental sleuthing, the physical labor, and the travels we make in the search, all bring us closer to ourselves, and the actual FINDING of an item is a little miracle of fate…
Because that item you just recovered was lost to the ages. It’s creator perhaps long gone; this lost thing of “value” was rotting in the earth–or languishing in an attic box lost to the world, unseen and unloved.
It was for all practical purposes, gone, destroyed, marked out of existence.
It doesn’t quite violate the law of conservation of mass, but hey, you just created something from nothing.
One of my favorite pieces is a Shoshone mano stone. It’s a rock, shaped and smoothed, used to grind corn. Hundreds of years ago, a living woman ground seed to make bread with this stone. The sweat of her hands still stains the stone and the calcified remains of the ground organic material still clings to the face of it. Who was she? What did her village look like around her while she worked the seeds with this stone? Had their tribe met the White Man yet? What were her great hopes and fears?
…And what would she say, hundreds of years later, if could see me here; kneeling in the dirt at the site of her old village, holding her mano stone,?
When I hold an artifact in my hands I feel a connection–a continuum with the past. It doesn’t feel like immortality…but it does feel like relevance. I have a place here. They came before me, and others will come after me. Perhaps one day someone will dig a treasure of mine out of the ground, and reflect on me the same way.