When the Earth Opened Her Hands

Emeris, the Stone Egg, the Unbroken Vase, and the Spring of 2025

There are some stories I can explain from beginning to end.

This is not one of them.

I can tell you where I was. I can tell you what I was doing. I can tell you what came out of the ground. I can show you the scar on the ceramic hippopotamus’s jaw—the exact place where my pickax struck him as I was digging. I can place the smooth, egg-shaped stone back into the curve of his mouth. I can hold the narrow floral vase that somehow emerged from the same area without being shattered.

I can show you the stones, the fossils, the petrified wood, the quartz, and the photographs.

What I cannot tell you is how long some of these things had been there, who placed the human-made objects beneath the soil, or why so many remarkable discoveries seemed to arrive one after another during one extraordinary spring weekend in 2025.

And I am learning to be comfortable with that.

Because the Dragonfly Archive has never needed every question answered. Sometimes the question is where the story begins.

And that spring, Mother Earth gave me a lot of questions.

What is this?

I Was Weak, but My Curiosity Was Not

I want to tell this part exactly as it was.

I was weak.

At that time in my life, my body had been going through repeated esophageal procedures under deep sedation approximately every eight weeks. My calendar seemed to revolve around procedures, recovery, trying to regain some strength, and then preparing to do it all over again.

I did not feel particularly powerful. I did not feel like some grand explorer setting out to discover hidden treasures beneath the earth. I was tired.

But one part of me was still very much alive: my curiosity.

Whenever I felt strong enough, I wanted to go outside. I wanted to paint. I wanted to think about planting. I wanted dirt beneath my fingernails. I wanted to work in the yard. I wanted to imagine what I might grow there.

Maybe that is the Virgo in me. Maybe it is simply April.

April picks up rocks.
April paints.
April digs.

I am the woman who stops in the middle of walking because something on the ground caught my eye. I turn stones over. I notice color. I notice texture. I notice an odd line running through something that someone else might never have looked at twice. I see shapes in wood grain. I see faces in fences. I see landscapes inside stone.

And if something looks different from everything around it, chances are very good that I am going to pick it up.

Before the Hippopotamus

When I tell this story, I know Emeris is probably going to be the part people remember. I understand why. It is difficult to compete with a ceramic hippopotamus coming out of the ground.

But he was not the beginning.

By the time I found him, the weekend had already become extraordinary. I was finding stone after stone: pieces that appeared to be petrified wood, jasper-like material, quartz, crystalline areas, fossil material, a fossilized clam, crinoid-like pieces, and different textures and colors I had never seen before.

Some I could make a reasonable identification of. Some required research. Some still sit comfortably in that very important category:

I don’t know.

That phrase has become more important to me than I ever expected. There is nothing wrong with not knowing. Not knowing means there is still something to learn.

One particular piece of jasper-like material fascinated me enough that I decided to crack it open. My husband was nearby when I did it.

The outside did not prepare me for the inside.

Bright red. Yellow. Deep contrasting color. Natural patterns that immediately caught the painter in me.

One section looked, to my eye, almost like a figure seated on the front of a throne.

I am not saying there was literally a person inside a rock. I am an artist. Artists see things. We see animals in clouds, faces in trees, human figures in shadows, and landscapes in marble. Once your eye becomes trained to look for composition, shape, color, line and movement, nature becomes an enormous gallery.

That broken stone stopped me. I remember looking at the red and yellow inside it and thinking:

What in the world am I finding out here?

And that was before the Stone Egg. Before Emeris. Before the vase.

The Stone Egg

Then I found another stone.

Smooth. Rounded. Brown. Oval. Almost unmistakably shaped like an egg.

I held it in my hand and looked at it for a while. It was such a simple object compared with some of the highly textured stones I had already been finding, but the shape was what caught me.

An egg: a shape long associated with spring, renewal, beginnings and life.

I did not have to force anything onto it. The stone already had the shape.

For the Dragonfly Archive, I began thinking of it simply as The Stone Egg.

Its geological identity is a separate matter. I have thought of it as jasper-like because of its appearance, but appearance alone is not enough for me to turn a working identification into scientific certainty. The Archive does not need to do that. The stone can remain beautiful while the question remains open.

I did not know then that the Stone Egg would eventually find what now seems like the most perfect place in the world for it: inside the open mouth of a ceramic hippopotamus I had not yet discovered.

I Was Thinking About the Garden

This is where I want the story told correctly.

I was not going outside to plant the succulent in the ground. Succulents belong in containers, and the one I had recently bought was meant to live that way.

What I was thinking about was the garden itself.

I was looking at the area near the cedar fence and thinking about planting there. About flowers. About making that part of the yard more alive. About what I might grow.

That was what put the pickax in my hand.

I was not treasure hunting. I was not conducting an archaeological excavation. I was not searching for antiques.

I was working the ground because I was thinking about creating a garden.

So I started digging.

Dirt. Roots. More dirt.

Then—

CLINK.

My pickax hit something solid.

Naturally, my first thought was: another rock.

At that point, rocks seemed to be everywhere. So I kept digging.

Then something changed. I started seeing color underneath the dirt. Red. White. Black. Something curved. Something glazed. Definitely not stone.

I cleared away more soil.

Then part of a face appeared. A mouth. An eye. A rounded head.

And suddenly my brain caught up with what my hands had uncovered.

A hippopotamus.

A ceramic hippopotamus planter, buried approximately two feet beneath the surface.

Even now, saying that out loud makes me smile, because what else can you do with a sentence like:

I went outside thinking about a garden and dug up a hippopotamus.

Every Hair on My Body Stood Up

I wish I could recreate exactly what that moment felt like.

I had already been finding strange and beautiful things: fossils, jasper, petrified wood, quartz, and the Stone Egg. And now I was staring down into the ground at a ceramic hippo.

I was physically weak. My body was tired.

But emotionally? I was completely awake.

Every hair on my body felt like it was standing up. I could not understand how so many things were coming together in such a short period of time.

I did not know whether to laugh, dig faster, stop and stare, or call someone over. Probably all of the above.

And somewhere in all of that excitement was the thought:

How long have you been down there?

The Scar on His Jaw

My pickax hit him.

That matters.

The damage you can still see along his jaw today came from me. One swing. One impact. One moment.

It could have been so much worse. A few inches in another direction and I might have shattered his entire face. Instead, the pickax caught the jaw.

He came up scarred. But he came up.

And I do not want that scar erased. I do not want it repaired. I do not want someone to restore him until he looks as if nothing ever happened.

Because something did happen.

That scar is the one piece of his history I can date with certainty. Whatever happened before I found him remains unknown, but the scar marks the exact moment his unknown past collided with my life.

That is part of his provenance now.

Emeris, the Earth-Returned

For a long time, he did not have a proper Archive name. He was simply the hippo. The one from the ground. The planter I almost destroyed with a pickax.

But a character who made an entrance like that deserved more.

So he became Emeris.

Pronounced eh-MAIR-iss.

Emeris, the Earth-Returned.

The name does not mean the Earth created him. Clearly, human hands made this ceramic object. Somebody designed him. Somebody formed him. Somebody decorated him. Somebody owned him.

Maybe he once sat in a garden. Maybe he held flowers. Maybe he held a succulent. Maybe he was discarded. Maybe he was lost. Maybe soil accumulated around him. Maybe landscaping changed.

There are dozens of possibilities.

Possibility is not evidence.

So the truth remains:

I do not know.

I do not know who owned Emeris. I do not know exactly how old he is. I do not know how long he was underground. I do not know why he was there.

But I know that Mother Earth held him before I did.

And in the spring of 2025, she gave him back.

That is why he is the Earth-Returned.

Then Came the Vase

You would think the hippopotamus would have been enough.

It was not.

Very near where I found Emeris, another human-made object emerged.

A vase.

Tall. Narrow. Cream-colored. Decorated with blue-green floral details, leaves and a little painted ribbon motif.

Delicate.

And somehow—

unbroken.

That may be the discovery that still puzzles me most.

Emeris is substantial. I can understand how a thick ceramic planter might survive underground.

But the vase?

Look at her. She appears delicate enough that one careless strike with a shovel could have ended her story.

Yet there she was. Whole.

How long was she buried? Who owned her? Why was she there? Was she placed there at the same time as Emeris? Did they ever belong together? Were they buried years apart and merely ended up near each other? Was there once a garden in that area?

Nobody knows.

And I refuse to invent an answer simply because a dramatic explanation would make good copy.

The truth is already extraordinary.

I dug into the earth and found a delicate vase beside a buried ceramic hippopotamus.

That is enough.

For now, she has an Archive name too:

The Unbroken Vase.

How Did You Survive?

That is still the question I want to ask her.

How?

Soil shifts. Roots grow. Water moves. People walk across the ground. Landscapes change. Years pass.

Yet somehow she survived. No enormous crack. No missing side. No broken neck.

She came up whole.

And there is something about that word—unbroken—that affected me deeply during that particular period of my life.

I was feeling anything but unbroken. My body had been through so much.

And here was this delicate little object coming out of the earth intact.

I do not need to call that a supernatural message. I do not need to say the vase had been buried there specifically for me.

But I am allowed to acknowledge what the moment meant to me.

Observation and meaning can coexist without becoming the same thing.

I Thought I Was Losing My Mind

There is another part of this story I do not want cleaned up for public consumption.

At some point, I wondered whether I was losing my mind.

There was simply too much coming at me at once. I was weak. I was recovering between procedures. I was already emotionally charged by everything my body had been through.

And suddenly I was finding one fascinating thing after another: a stone cracked open with blazing red and yellow, petrified wood, quartz, crystals, fossil material, a fossilized clam, crinoids, the Stone Egg, a hippopotamus, and an unbroken vase.

How many times can you say What is this? before you start asking What is happening?

I wondered whether exhaustion was making everything feel more intense. I wondered whether I was simply so excited that my mind was running away with me.

But then I came back to something very simple.

The objects were there.

I could hold them. I could photograph them. My husband could see them. Other people could see them.

I did not have to understand their meaning. I did not have to make a huge claim.

I could simply document what I had found.

That became a very important lesson:

When emotion becomes enormous, return to the object.

What can I see? What can I photograph? What can I measure? What can I verify? What remains unknown?

That way of thinking would eventually become part of the philosophy behind the Dragonfly Archive.

Mother Earth Gives Me Gifts

I say this often:

Mother Earth gives me gifts.

That is the language I use for my relationship with discovery.

I do not mean the Earth sat at a pottery wheel and created Emeris. I do not mean the vase was manufactured by nature.

The human-made objects have human histories. The stones have geological histories. The fossils have biological histories. Petrified wood has its own story of transformation. Quartz has its own story.

Some of those stories can be researched. Some may eventually be identified with confidence. Others may remain unknown.

But before these things were in my hands, they were in or upon the Earth.

I looked. I dug. I noticed.

And there they were.

That feels like receiving. So I call them gifts.

Sometimes Mother Earth’s gift is something spectacular. Sometimes it is tiny. Sometimes it is beautiful. Sometimes it is strange. Sometimes it is something that makes me ask questions for months.

And apparently sometimes Mother Earth gives me a hippopotamus.

April Picks Up Rocks. April Paints. April Digs.

People sometimes ask me how I keep finding things.

One answer is embarrassingly simple.

I look.

I really look.

I pick things up. I turn them over. I bring some home. I wash them. I wet them to see how the colors change. I photograph them from different angles. I look under different light. I ask questions. I research.

Sometimes I think I know what I have. Sometimes I discover that I was wrong. Then I change the identification.

That is part of learning.

The Archive is not about pretending I knew everything from the beginning. It is about documenting the journey honestly.

Painting trained my eye long before I started seriously studying the things I was picking up from the ground. A painter learns that brown is never simply brown. Gray is rarely just gray. A shadow can contain violet. A stone can contain rust, cream, gold, red, black, blue-gray and tiny points of reflected light.

Texture matters. Line matters. Shape matters. Negative space matters.

A streak of red inside jasper can stop me the way a red stroke across a canvas can stop me. Petrified wood can look like a landscape. Quartz can look like frost. Mineral patterns can become abstract compositions.

The painter in me was already trained to notice.

Then I turned that eye toward the ground.

And suddenly the ground became magnificent.

The Succulent Came After

The succulent is still part of Emeris’s story. Just not in the way the story can easily be misunderstood.

I had bought that succulent only a couple of days before I found him. I was not planning to put it into the garden. It was a succulent. It belonged in a container.

Then Mother Earth handed me a container.

A very unexpected one.

Once Emeris was cleaned and brought above ground, the succulent went into him.

That is the real sequence.

I had been thinking about planting a garden. I dug. I found an old ceramic planter. And because I happened to have a new succulent waiting for a home, Emeris became useful again almost immediately.

An old vessel came out of the ground.

And then I put new life into it.

I did not plan that symbolism. That is why it matters to me.

Sometimes reality writes a better metaphor than a storyteller ever could.

The Stone Egg Finds Its Place

Eventually, the Stone Egg found its place too.

Emeris has an open mouth. The egg-shaped stone fits beautifully inside it. So that is where it rests today.

There is an important distinction I want the Archive to preserve:

I did not uncover Emeris with the Stone Egg already sitting in his mouth.

That would be a wonderful dramatic detail. It would also be untrue.

I found both during that remarkable spring period and later brought them together. That is part of their life with me—their second story.

The Unbroken Vase and the Flowers She Holds Today

The vase has also begun a second life. She no longer sits underground. Today she can hold flowers again.

Among the flowers I have placed in her are purple blossoms I brought back from Casper Mountain at Crimson Dawn, from the Lavender Witch Sanctuary.

I love that connection.

A vessel of unknown history comes back from beneath the Earth and later holds flowers gathered from another place that carries meaning in my life.

Again, I do not need to claim that was destined.

I only need to notice it.

Objects continue acquiring stories after we find them. The Archive does not stop at discovery. Sometimes discovery is simply the beginning.

One Scarred. One Stone. One Unbroken.

Today, when I place the three primary finds together, I see them differently.

Emeris, the Earth-Returned. The scarred one.

The Stone Egg. The natural one.

The Unbroken Vase. The delicate one.

One came back scarred. One came back shaped like an ancient symbol of spring and renewal. One came back whole.

And I came out of that weekend changed too.

Not because I suddenly had all the answers.

Because I had learned to pay closer attention.

And Then I Kept Finding Things

That may be the most important part of what happened afterward.

I kept looking.

And I kept finding.

More petrified wood. More jasper-like material. More quartz. More crystals. More stones. More things that made me stop.

It felt as though the Earth had begun revealing herself everywhere.

I do not mean that a literal supernatural door opened beneath my yard.

Something changed in me.

My eye had learned a new vocabulary.

Once you understand what petrified wood can look like, you begin seeing structures you might once have ignored. Once you learn to recognize quartz, little flashes of crystal become difficult to miss. Once you crack open something ordinary-looking and discover brilliant red and yellow inside, you stop judging stones only by their exterior.

Attention changes everything.

The more I learned, the more I saw. The more I saw, the more questions I asked. The more questions I asked, the larger the Archive became.

The Dragonfly Archive Was Hiding Inside the Question

Looking back now, I think this period helped shape one of the fundamental ideas behind the Dragonfly Archive.

The Archive did not begin because I knew everything.

It grew because I did not.

What is this?

That question became permission: permission to investigate, permission to change my mind, permission to admit uncertainty, and permission to tell a story without confusing that story with evidence.

What is observable? What is a working identification? What is unknown? What does the object make me imagine?

Those are different questions, and I have learned to respect the difference between them.

April examines the object. April picks up the rock. April paints what catches her eye.

And then another part of me begins listening for story.

That is where AVRILIS enters.

AVRILIS does not need to change the facts. Reality gave her enough.

A woman who was physically weak went outside thinking about a garden. She cracked open an astonishing stone. She found fossils. She found petrified wood. She found quartz. She found a Stone Egg. She struck something with her pickax. She pulled a ceramic hippopotamus out of the Earth. Then she found an intact vase nearby.

That is already a story.

I Needed Wonder

There is another truth underneath all of this.

I needed that weekend.

The discoveries did not cure anything. They did not make my medical problems disappear. They did not suddenly make my body strong.

But they gave my mind somewhere else to go.

Wonder. Curiosity. Color. Questions.

For a while, I was not thinking only about procedures and recovery.

I was thinking: What is that? Is that quartz? Could this be petrified wood? Is this a fossil? Why is this stone shaped like an egg? How is there a hippopotamus under my yard? How did that vase survive?

I was weak.

And I was excited.

Those two things can exist at the same time.

Wonder does not wait for perfect circumstances. Sometimes it finds you when you are exhausted. Sometimes it waits beneath your feet. Sometimes you have to hit it with a pickax before you realize it is there.

When the Earth Opened Her Hands

That is how I remember the spring of 2025.

Not as the weekend when I found one funny ceramic object.

It was bigger than that.

It was a cascade.

Stone. Color. Fossil. Crystal. Wood. The Stone Egg. Emeris. The Unbroken Vase. Questions.

One after another.

It felt as though the Earth had opened her hands and said:

Look.

Not: Here are all the answers.

Just:

Look closer.

And I did.

I have been looking ever since.

These Objects Are Still With Me

Emeris is still mine. The Stone Egg is still mine. The Unbroken Vase is still mine.

They are not merchandise. They are not inventory.

They are part of my private collection and part of the living story behind the Dragonfly Archive.

On September 27, 2026, I will be bringing a small selection of these objects and other Archive finds with me to my Dragonfly Journals book-signing event at Herb & Smudge Apothecary.

They will be there to see, to look at closely, and to connect the stories with the real objects that inspired them.

They will be on display only and not for sale.

The Things Mother Earth Gave Back

I cannot tell you how long Emeris was underground. I cannot tell you who once owned the Unbroken Vase. I cannot tell you whether those two human-made objects entered the ground at the same time. I cannot tell you the full geological history of every stone I found. I cannot tell you why that spring brought so many discoveries into my hands so quickly.

Some of those questions may eventually be answered. Some may not.

But there is one thing I know.

I went outside weak. I put my hands into the dirt.

And the Earth gave things back.

A brilliant broken stone. A fossilized clam. Crinoids. Petrified wood. Quartz. Crystal. A Stone Egg. A ceramic hippopotamus with a freshly scarred jaw. And a delicate vase that somehow returned to the light whole.

I still pick up rocks. I still paint. I still dig.

And I still ask:

What is this?

Because once you have lived through a weekend like that, you understand something.

The ground beneath your feet is not empty.

The ordinary world is not nearly as ordinary as it appears.

Sometimes you go outside thinking about planting a garden. You put a pickax into the earth.

And instead—

the Earth opens her hands.

Mother Earth does not always give me answers. Sometimes she gives me gifts. Sometimes she gives me mysteries. Sometimes she gives me stories.

And sometimes, apparently—she gives me a hippopotamus.

— AVRILIS

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