CELEBRATING EARTH DAY
A LOVE LETTER TO THE EARTH
It was 2004. I was in Kumarakom, Kerala, deep in the backwaters of southern India.
The water was murky. The air thick and warm. I was gravely ill, unable to move, and far from my children back home in California. I had nothing with me but a book, the sounds of the water, and somewhere in the distance, the soft rise and fall of yoga chanting drifting across the air.
And then I saw them. Lotus flowers.
Rising out of the muddiest water I had ever seen. Fully open. Completely unbothered by what they had to come through to get there.
I stayed still for a long time and just watched them.
That moment, over twenty-two years ago now, became the turning point of my life. And it became the birthplace of everything I create.
THE SEED OF A COLLECTION
I had traveled to India looking for gemstones. What I found instead was a reverence for the natural world woven into every textile, every woodblock, every piece of art I encountered. The patterns were full of vines, symbols of connection, and lotus flowers, over and over again, in every form.
I spent afternoons with textile artists poring over antique woodblocks, the hand-carved printing tools used for centuries to press lotus flowers, vines, and botanical motifs onto fabric. I collected them. I held them. They were nature made permanent in wood. And alongside them, I found antique brass stamping dies, used to press gossamer-thin sheets of gold into jewelry. These artifacts would become the seeds of an entire collection.
Nature wasn't decoration in India. It was devotion.
When I became ill in the backwaters of Kumarakom, I couldn't do anything but be still. And in that stillness, listening to the distant chanting, watching the kingfisher birds skim across the water, watching those lotus flowers rise from the mud, something in me understood.
You don't have to force the bloom.
I kept bringing myself back to one word: resilience. Not the loud, pushing kind. The quiet kind. The kind the lotus practices every single day, rooted in the dark, growing toward the light, unhurried and unshaken.
When I came home, I cast our very first lotus from one of those antique brass stamping dies, carved with a lotus, pressed into wax, cast into the piece that started everything.
I called it Sun Lotus, for the way the light reflected off the water in Udaipur. Its mantra: Be Resilient. It was the first piece I ever made with a mantra. It would not be the last.
WHY EARTH DAY FEELS PERSONAL
Every year when Earth Day arrives, I go back to my garden. Not metaphorically, literally.
Here in Northern California, spring is doing what spring always does. Things are pushing up through the soil. Buds are forming that weren't there last week. And every evening I come home and I water and I watch and I notice.
This is my meditation now. My version of the chanting on the backwaters.
Because the Earth never rushes. She plants a seed and she tends to it. She gives it darkness before she gives it light. She lets it struggle a little because that is what makes it strong. And when the time is right, not a moment before, she lets it bloom.
We live in a world that wants everything instantly.
But nature is not instant. Nature is intentional.
The most beautiful things, a garden, a life, a piece of jewelry born from a decade of inspiration, they all ask the same thing of us. Patience. Presence. The willingness to tend to what matters and let go of what doesn't.
Beauty Born From Depth
Each piece in our collection carries a mantra, a single word or phrase born the same way the design was: through stillness, through intention, through listening.
BE RESILIENT
Inspired by an antique Indian brass stamping die, our Sun Lotus talisman is the heart and soul of Lulu Designs.
BOUNDLESS LOVE
Named for the heart chakra, Anahata is a four-pointed flower with a circle at its center, a reminder that boundless love is what holds all things together.
SPIRITUAL ALIGNMENT
An ode to alignment, our Chakra flower is represented by an eight-petaled lotus,
symbolizing harmony and balance through becoming.
TRUST THE PROCESS
Inspired by an Indian mandala, this magnificent flower teaches us that the art of
becoming happens through patience and perseverance.
PASSION & BEAUTY
Ornate, independent, and alive, our Lulu Flower is inspired by vintage botanical
drawings and represents our passion for beauty.
ILLUMINATE YOUR ESSENCE
From the Sanskrit word for bliss, this petal-shaped piece reminds us that each of us
has a light within, ready to glow and grow.
AN INVITATION FOR EARTH DAY
This April 22nd, I invite you to do one thing. Go outside. Put your hands in the soil if you can. Or simply look at something growing and ask yourself: what seed have I planted lately that I need to tend to?
And if you want to carry a reminder of that intention, something small and beautiful that whispers I am rooted, I am growing, I will bloom; our Lotus Collection is here for you. These pieces were born from the Earth. They were made to be worn by people who are not afraid of the mud it takes to get to the light.
