capital region etsy finds- gingko!

I know that I have featured these shops before on this blog, but now I actually own some goodies from them.  Matt was awesome enough to buy me two of my Etsy favorites for Christmas this year.  I've been eying these particular pieces from afar, and am SO glad that I get to wear them every day!

First up is this amazing ginkgo leaf ring by esdesigns.  

For years I have had a fascination with gingko leaves, ever since reading a poem that featured them.  I actually lost the poem for years, and looking at this ring reminded me of it so much that I went on a quest for it.  I'm going to share the whole thing here, because I just found it, and it really means so much to me:

This is a poem by Marvin Bell called These Green-Going-to-Yellow:

This year,
I'm raising the emotional ante,
putting my face
in the leaves to be stepped on,
seeing myself among them, that is;
that is, likening
leaf-vein to artery, leaf to flesh,
the passage of a leaf in autumn
to the passage of autumn,
branch-tip and winter spaces
to possibilities, and possibility
to God. Even on East 61st Street
in the blowzy city of New York,
someone has planted a gingko
because it has leaves like fans like hands,
hand-leaves, and sex. Those lovely
Chinese hands on the sidewalks
so far from delicacy
or even, perhaps, another gender of gingko--
do we see them?
No one ever treated us so gently
as these green-going-to-yellow hands
fanned out where we walk.
No one ever fell down so quietly
and lay where we would look
when we were tired or embarrassed,
or so bowed down by humanity
that we had to watch out lest our shoes stumble,
and looked down not to look up
until something looked like parts of people
where we were walking. We have no
experience to make us see the gingko
or any other tree,
and, in our admiration for whatever grows tall
and outlives us,
we look away, or look at the middles of things,
which would not be our way
if we truly thought we were gods.